
Class _ 
Book 



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flIMlton's Englanb 



THIS LITTLE STUDY 

OF BYGONE DAYS AND ANCIENT PLACES 

IS INSCRIBED TO THE 

PURITAN SCHOLAR AND DEAR FELLOW PILGRIM 

WHO WANDERED WITH ME 

ONE HAPPY SUMMER THROUGH 

MILTON'S ENGLAND. 




I CAMOtaiDOE 

2. LONDON) 

3 WINDSOE 

-4- ETON 

5 MOETON 

© BUNNIMe-DE: 

7 STOKE POXjIS' 

e MABErMtLD 

B BEACON SMErLD 

I© CHAL-FONT ST. 

I I AMEBSHAM 

12 CHENIE9 

13 THE CAM 

1-4 THE THAM&5 

15 THCr COL.NE: 



MAP OF MILTON'S ENGLAND 



John Milton 

Photogravure from the engraving by T. Woolnoth of the miniatu 
painted m 1667 by William Faithome 



L 



flIMlton'e England 



Uucia antes flpeafc 

Sutbor of 

"Great "Cbougbts for little Ubinfeers," "/©emoirs 

of a {Billionaire, " "Uo "Odbom flMicb 

3s Given " 



UllustrateD 




Boston 
X. <T. page & Company 

/nbDCCcrcflnir 



THE LiSSArtY of 

CONGRESS, 
,-,.... c- PtEii Recsivec 

1902 

OotVSIQWT ENTWV 

Ci-ASS ;i XXo. No. 

!■! t, O 8 

COt»Y B. 



,* 



V 



Copyright, iqo2 
By L. C. Page & Company 

(incorporated) 
^4// rights reserved 



Published, September, 1902 



Colonial Prcas 

Electrotyped and Printed by C. H. Simonds & Co. 

Boston, Mass., U.S.A. 



I 1 



/DMlton's IResifcences in XonDon 

i. Bread Street, 1608- 1624. 

2. St. Bride's Churchyard, in 1639 or 1640. 

3. Aldersgate Street, 1640-1645. 

4. The Barbican, 1645- 1647. 

5. Holborn, near Lincoln's Inn, 1647- 1649. 

6. Charing Cross, opening into Spring Gardens, 
seven months in 1649. 

7. Whitehall, by Scotland Yard, 1649- 1652. 

8. Petty France, now York Street, 1652- 1660. 

9. Bartholomew Close, and a prison, 1660. 

10. Holborn, near Red Lion Square, in 1660. 

11. Jewin Street, 1 661 -1663 or 1664. 

12. Artillery Walk, by Bunhill Fields Cemetery, 
1 664- 1 665, and from 1666 to November, 1674. 



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Contents 



CHAPTER 
I. 

II. 

III. 

IV. 
V. 



VII. 

VIII. 

IX. 



The London into Which Milton Was 
Born 

Milton's Life on Bread Street 

Milton at Cambridge 

Milton at Horton 

Milton on the Continent. — In St, 
Bride's Churchyard — At Aldersgate 
Street. — The Barbican. — Holborn. — 
Spring Gardens .... 

Milton at Whitehall. — Scotland Yard, 

— Petty France. — Bartholomew Close, 

— High Holborn. — Jewin Street. — Ar- 
tillery Walk 

Chalfont St. Giles. — Artillery Walk 

The Tower — Tower Hill 

All Hallows, Barking. — St. Olave's. — 
St. Catherine Cree's. — St. Andrew 
Undershaft 

Crosby Hall. — St. Helen's. — St. Ethel- 
burga's. — St. Giles's, Cripplegate 

Gresham College. — Austin Friars, 
Guildhall. — St. Mary's, Alderman- 
bury. — Christ's Hospital. — St. Sepul- 
chre's 

Charterhouse. — St. John's Gate. — St. 
Bartholomew's. — Smithfield . 



42 
57 
78 



143 
164 



184 



viii Contents 

XIII. Ely Place. — Inns of Court. — Temple 
Church. — Covent Garden. — Somerset 
House 221 

XIV. Whitehall. — Westminster Abbey . . 240 
XV. The Precincts of the Abbey. — West- 
minster Palace. — St. Margaret's . 264 

XVI. Lambeth Palace. — St. Saviour's. — Lon- 
don Bridge 277 

XVII. The Plague. — The Fire. — Wren.— Lon- 
don Rebuilt 293 



Xist of Ullustrations 



PAGE 



John Milton Frontispiece 

Old St. Paul's Cathedral 47 

Dean Colet, the Founder of St. Paul's School 55 
Sidney - Sussex College, Cambridge ... 59 

Christ's College, Cambridge 62 

St. Sepulchre's Church, Cambridge ... 70 

The Church at Horton 80 

Part of Whitehall 10 1 

Rear of Milton's House, and Tree Planted 
by Him, York Street, Westminster (Petty 

France) 103 

In Milton's House at Chalfont St. Giles . .113 
St. Catherine Cree Church in 1736 . . 157 

Monument to John Stow, St. Andrew Under- 

shaft 161 

Church of St. Andrew Undershaft in 1737 . 163 

Crosby Hall 170 

Church of St. Giles Cripplegate in 1737 . .178 

Gresham College 184 

The Charterhouse 203 

St. John's Gate, Clerkenwell .... 209 
Church of St. Bartholomew the Great . .212 

Middle Temple Hall 235 

Somerset House 239 

The King's Gate at Whitehall . . . .241 



x Xist ot UUustrations 

PAGB 

Oliver Cromwell 244 

Westminster Abbey as Milton Knew It . . 250 

In the Poets' Corner 254 

Westminster Hall 274 

In Lambeth Palace 280 

The Lollards' Tower, Lambeth Palace . . 283 
Gower's Monument, in St. Saviour's Church, 

Southwark 287 

The Royal Exchange 295 

Bow Steeple, Cheapside 304 




/UMlton's lEnQlanb 

CHAPTER I. 

THE LONDON INTO WHICH MILTON WAS BORN 

• O every well-read man whose mother 
tongue is English, whether he be born in 
America or Australia or within sound of 
Bow Bells, the little dot upon the map, marked 
" London," has an interest which surpasses that 
of any spot on earth. Though in his school-days 
he was taught nothing of the city's topography and 
little of its local history, while he has laboriously 
learned outlandish names on every continent, never- 
theless, in his mind's eye, Westminster Abbey looms 
larger than Chimborazo, and a half-dozen miles of 
the tidal Thames have more of meaning to him 
than as many thousand of the Amazon, the Oxus, 
and the Ganges. To know London — its mighty, 
historic past and its complex, stupendous present — 
is to know the religion, the art, the science, the 



ia /HMlton's England 

politics, — the development, in short, of the Anglo- 
Saxon race. 

Perhaps there is no better method of coming to 
know what is most interesting in this centre of all 
English life than studying one of the supremely 
important periods of its long history, when it was 
touched by the spiritual genius of one of England's 
most noble sons. 

Three periods of a hundred years each stand out 
above all others since the Christian era in their 
significance and richness of accomplishment. 

The third period began about 1790 with the birth 
of the American Republic and the outbreak of the 
French Revolution. The first was that one hundred 
years which from 1450 to 1550 included the begin- 
ning of the general use of gunpowder, which made 
the pigmy with a pistol more than the match for 
giant with spear and battleaxe. Then it was that 

" Gutenberg made thought cosmopolite 
And stretched electric wires from mind to mind." 

In this period Italian art made its most splendid 
achievements, and Luther, Calvin, and Columbus 
gave man new freedom and new possibilities. 

The middle period — the one in which England 
made her greatest contribution to human advance- 
ment — is the one that we are to consider. Milton's 



/HMlton's Enolanfc 13 

life covered sixty-six of its one hundred years. It 
began with the destruction of the Spanish Armada 
in 1588, and included the brilliant period of explora- 
tion and adventure just before Milton's birth, in 
which Hawkins, Drake, and Raleigh, and other am- 
bitious and not too scrupulous sea-rovers sought, like 
Cecil Rhodes, jewels and gold, empire, expansion, 
and renown. 

It covered the chief work of Shakespeare, Ben 
Jonson, Lord Bacon, Milton, Bunyan, Defoe, 
Dryden, and fifty other men still read to-day. It 
included all of Milton's great Puritan contempo- 
raries, who, fighting for the rights of Englishmen, 
fought the world's battle for freedom. It ended in 
1688 with the downfall of the house of Stuart and 
the final triumph of those principles for which Vane 
and Milton had struggled and died without seeing 
the fruit of their labours. Since 1688 no monarch 
has sat upon the English throne by any outworn 
theory of " divine right of kings," but only, explic- 
itly and emphatically, by the will of the English 
people. 

For all believers in the people, for all who honour 
Washington and Jefferson and Lincoln, Robert 
Burns, John Bright and Gladstone, the century that 
knew Cromwell and Milton, Sir Harry Vane and 
Sir John Eliot, John Hampden, John Winthrop and 



i4 /HMlton'9 EnQlanfc 

William Bradford must, more than most others, 
have significance. 

John Milton was born in London in 1608; and 
it is chiefly the London of the twenty years that 
intervened between the Spanish Armada and his 
birth which we are to consider in this chapter. 

As neither man nor anything that he has made 
can be well understood except as they 'are related 
to their origins, so to understand the names, the 
customs, and the daily sights that the boy Milton 
knew in this city, where for nearly two millenniums 
before his day history had been making, one must 
go back and take a brief survey. 

Into the mooted question of the origin of the 
name of London we need not enter. Suffice to say 
that when we first hear of London it was a little 
hamlet on a hill of perhaps one hundred feet in 
height, lying between two ranges of higher hills. 
At the north rose what we now call Highgate 
and Hampstead, about 450 feet high, and to 
the south, beyond the marshes and the Thames 
and a broad shallow lagoon, whose little islands 
once marked the site of Southwark, rose the 
Surrey hills, from one of which in our day the 
Crystal Palace gleams. Men with stone weapons 
slew antlered deer upon the little marshy island of 
Thorney, now Westminster. What is now St. 



flMlton's Enalanfc T5 

James's Park was then an estuary. Streams flowed 
down the valleys between the wooded hills. Only 
their names remain to-day to tell us, among the 
present stony streets, where rivers and brooks once 
flowed. West Bourn, Ty Bourn, Hole Bourne, the 
southern part of which was called the " Fleet," 
flowed from the hills in the northwest in a south- 
easterly direction into the Thames. Just east of the 
last named was the little brook called " Wallbrook," 
by whose banks, on the present Cornhill, the first 
settlement was made. All these names, of course, 
belong to a time long subsequent to the first rude 
settlements made in unknown antiquity before the 
Christian era. The Tyburn at its mouth divided, 
enclosing the island Thorney, upon which in later 
times arose Westminster. Hole Bourne was so 
named because of its running through a deep hollow. 
The lower part of the river — the Fleet — was 
tidal, and formed the western bulwark of London 
for centuries. It emptied into the Thames where 
now is Blackfriars Bridge. 

Far eastward from the Wallbrook, through broad 
marshes, flowed the river Lea down from the country 
known to us as Essex and Hertfordshire. It emptied 
into the Thames east of the Isle of Dogs, which 
is now covered with huge docks for the shipping of 
the great modern city. The Lea still flows as in 



16 /Hilton's England 

the time of the Romans and Saxons, though its 
marshes have largely disappeared. But the other 
smaller streams are now obliterated, though in 
Milton's time their course could still partly be dis- 
cerned, and their degradation into drains was not 
complete. 

Through Bread Street, on which Milton was born, 
passed Watling Street, the old Roman road, named 
later by the Saxons, which with the Roman wall 
around the city alone left traces of the Roman 
occupation in the poet's day. The mosaic floors, the 
coins, bronze weapons and scanty remains of the 
Roman period, before the fourth century A. D., are 
better known to us than to the Londoners of his 
time. The Roman city spread itself along the river 
from the Fleet on the west to the site of the present 
Tower of London on the east, and then gradually 
crept northward. By the time the Roman wall was 
built in about 360 A. D.. the circumference of the 
city, counting the river front, was two miles and 
three quarters. Here stood the town, not in an 
area of fertile fields, but surrounded by forests on 
the north, and on all other sides by wide-spreading 
marshes. The enclosed space was originally 380 
acres, to which later additions were made upon 
the north and east. The wall was built of 
layers of thin red brick and stone about twenty 



flDilton's Enalanfc 17 

feet high, and was finished by bastions and 
additional defences at the angles. Though scant 
traces of any of the original construction now re- 
main, much of the Roman wall, and, at all events, 
a complete wall of mingled Roman and mediaeval 
work, encircled the site of the ancient city limits in 
Milton's day, and its gates were nightly locked until 
long after his death. 

At first, two land gates had sufficed, but in 1600 
there were seven; on the east, Aldgate; further 
north was Bishopsgate; further west, upon the 
northern wall, were Moorgate and Cripplegate ; upon 
the west, Aldersgate, protected by the Barbican, one 
of the gateway towers ; and south of this, Newgate 
and Ludgate. Upon the waterside, Dowgate, at the 
mouth of the ancient Wallbrook, now covered by 
the narrow street of the same name, and Billingsgate, 
further east toward the Tower of London, gave 
access to the city. 

In Roman days the whole enclosure was crossed 
by two great streets, — Watling Street, which came 
from the northwest and entered near Newgate, and 
Ermyn Street, which came from the northeast. 
Where these two met was later the market or chepe, 
from the Saxon word meaning sale. 

Of the Saxon period, which followed the sudden 
and mysterious abandonment of their city by the 



is flDtlton's jEnQlanfc 

Romans after their occupation of it for three cen- 
turies, we have to-day a thousand traces in London 
names. Evidently the early Anglo-Saxon, like his 
descendants, had a marked love of privacy and 
seclusion. His sense of the sacred nature of prop- 
erty was as marked in him as it has always been 
in his posterity. The idea of inclosure or protection 
is made prominent in the constantly recurring termi- 
nations of ton, ham, worth, stoke, stoic, fold, garth, 
park, hay, burgh, bury, trough, borrow. Philologic 
study of continental terms displays no such marked 
emphasis upon the idea of property and demarkation 
lines. Says the learned Taylor : " It may indeed be 
said, without exaggeration, that the universal preva- 
lence throughout England of names containing this 
word, Homes [viz., ham, ton, etc.], gives us the clue 
to the real strength of the national character of the 
Anglo-Saxon race." Kensington, Brompton. Pad- 
dington, Islington, are but a few of the local names 
which illustrate in their suffix the origin of the 
word town — originally a little hedged enclosure. 
[German saun or hedge.] The most important rem- 
nant of the Saxon influence is to be found in 
the syllable ing which occurs in thousands of 
London names. This was the usual Anglo-Saxon 
patronymic, and occurs most often in the middle 
syllable, as in Buckingham, the home of Buck's 



flDUton's England 19 

son ; Wellington, the village of Wells's son, or the 
Wells clan. Family settlements are traceable by this 
syllable ing. 

Chipping or chepe was the old English term for 
market-place, and Westcheap and Eastcheap were 
the old London markets of Saxon days. When the 
word market takes the place in England of the old 
Anglo-Saxon chipping, we may assume the place 
to be of later origin. 

The Saxons, unlike the Romans, were not road- 
makers, and when they applied the English word 
street, corrupted from the Latin strata, as in the 
case of Watling Street — the ancient road which 
they renamed — we shall usually find that it marks 
a work of Roman origin. 

Clerkenwell, Bridewell, Holywell, and names 
with similar suffixes indicate the site of wells from 
which it would seem that the ancient Londoners 
derived their water supply when it was not taken 
from the Thames, the Holborn, or the Tyburn. 
Hithe, which means landing-place, has in later times 
largely disappeared, except at Rotherhithe near 
Greenwich. 

With the conversion of the Saxons in the seventh 
century appear the names of Saxon saints. Among 
the notable ones to whom churches were built was 
holy St. Ethelburga, the wife of Sebert, the first 



20 /IDUton's England 

Christian king, whose church to-day stands on the 
site of its Saxon predecessor beside Bishopsgate, 
on the very spot where stood the Roman gate. 
Another was St. Osyth, queen and martyr, whose 
name also survives in Sise, or St. Osyth's Lane, and 
whose black and grimy churchyard was doubtless 
green in Milton's day. To these must be added St. 
Dunstan, St. Swithin, St. Edmund the Martyr, and 
St. Botolph, to whom no less than four churches 
were erected. 

The devastating fire of 1135 swept London from 
end to end, and not a Saxon structure remained, 
though the new ones that replaced them were built in 
similar fashion. With the coming of the Danes were 
built churches to their patrons, St. Olaf and St. 
Magnus ; and in the centre of the Strand, St. 
Clement's, Danes, is said to mark the spot where 
tradition assigns a settlement of Danes. 

As of the Saxons, so of the Danes, the most 
permanent record of their influence on London and 
the Danish district of England was in their suffixes 
to words which still survive. By, meaning first a 
farm and later a village, is one which occurs some 
six hundred times. To this day our common term, 
a by-law, recalls the Dane. 

The names of the street on which Milton was 
born and of those in the near neighbourhood to the 



flDUton's EnQlanfc 21 

booths that once surrounded Cheap indicate the 
products formerly sold there, or the trades carried on 
within them. To the north the streets were called : 
Wood, Milk, Iron, Honey, Poultry; to the south 
they were named after Bread, Candles, Soap, Fish, 
Money-Changing. Friday Street was one on which 
fish and food for fast days were sold. 

Of Saxon and Danish London there remains in 
the old city proper not one stone. Of Norman 
London, we have to-day the great White Tower, the 
crypt of Bow Church, from whose round arches it 
received its name, the crypt of St. John's Priory out- 
side the city, part of the church of St. Bartholomew's 
the Great, and part of St. Ethelburga's, Bishopsgate. 
Much more existed before the Great Fire of 1666. 
The chief characteristics of the English Norman 
work are the half-circular Roman arch, seen in all 
Romanesque work: massive walls unsupported by 
great buttresses and not pierced by the large win- 
dows which appear in the later Gothic style ; square 
towers without spires ; barrel vaulting over nave 
and aisles in the churches ; massive piers ; the use 
of colour upon ornaments and wall surfaces instead 
of in the windows as in Gothic buildings; small 
interlacing round arches in wall surfaces; zigzag 
and " dog tooth " decoration ; " pleated " capitals ; 
carvings, more or less grotesque, of human or 



22 /Baton's Bnalano 

animal forms. English Norman, like English 
Gothic, never equalled the French work in both 
these styles. 

In Milton's boyhood the impress of Plantagenet 
London was everywhere visible. Throughout the 
centuries, from the earliest to the latest Plantagenet, 
the influence of the Church reigned supreme. It 
has been estimated that then at least one-fourth of 
the area of all London was in some way connected 
with the Church, or the extensive conventual estab- 
lishments belonging to it. Their Gothic towers and 
steeples rose clean and pure to the soft blue of the 
London sky, unfouled with coal smoke. Their lofty 
walls, over which English ivy crept and roses 
bloomed, shut from the narrow streets of the old 
town stretches of soft greensward and shady walks. 
Among these rose dormitories, refectories, cloisters, 
and the more prosaic offices. At every hour bells 
pealed and constantly reminded the citizens of 
prayer and service. 

Hardly a street but had its monastery or convent 
garden. Most of these were just within or just 
without the city wall, as they were founded when 
the city had already become of a considerable size, 
and they were therefore located in the more open 
parts. The enormous size of the equipment of these 
religious establishments before the Reformation, in 



/IDilton's JEwjlanfc 23 

the century when Milton's grandfather was young, 
can scarcely be conceived to-day when the adjuncts 
of the Church have shrunk almost to nothingness. 
In Milton's boyhood, it must have been an easy 
task among the recent ruins and traditions of these 
great establishments to reconstruct them to the 
imagination in their entirety. Sir Walter Besant 
in his graphic book on " London " details the num- 
bers supported in this earlier period by St. Paul's 
alone. The cathedral body included the bishop, 
dean, the four archdeacons, the treasurer, the pre- 
centor, the chancellor, thirty greater canons, twelve 
lesser canons, about fifty chaplains or chantry priests, 
and thirty vicars. Of lower rank were the sacrist 
and three vergers, the servitors, the surveyor, the 
twelve scribes, the book transcriber, the bookbinder, 
the chamberlain, the rent-collector, the baker, the 
brewer, the singing men and choir boys, of whom 
priests were made, the bedesmen and the poor folk. 
In addition to these were the servants and assistants 
of all these officers; the sextons, gravediggers, 
gardeners, bell ringers, makers and menders of the 
ecclesiastical robes, cleaners and sweepers, carpen- 
ters, masons, painters, carvers, and gilders. 

A similar body, though somewhat smaller, was 
required in every other religious foundation. No 
wonder that not only one- fourth of the area but also 



24 /IDUton's Enolan& 

one-fourth of the whole city population was needed 
to supply these demands. 

From Norman London there remained, besides 
St. Paul's vast monastic house, the priory of St. Bar- 
tholomew's, the house of St. Mary Overie's, the 
hospital of St. Katharine's, and the priory of the 
Holy Trinity. In Plantagenet London, we find the 
priory of Crutched — that is, Crossed — Friars, 
who wore a red cross upon their back and carried 
an iron cross in their hands. Farther north upon 
the other side of Aldgate stood the great monastery 
of Holy Trinity, the richest and most magnificent in 
the city; and the priory of St. Helen's. Bishopsgate, 
whose noble ruins had not disappeared more than 
a century after Milton's death. Farther west and 
north of Broad Street stood the splendid house of 
Austin Friars ; still farther west was St. Martin's le 
Grand, and just beyond, the foundation of the Gray 
Friars or Franciscans. Christ's Hospital, which lies 
chiefly on the site of this old monastery, we shall 
consider in a later chapter. In the southwest corner 
of the London wall dwelt the Black Friars — the 
Dominicans — whose name to-day is perpetuated in 
Blackfriars Bridge. 

Outside the walls were other establishments as 
rich and splendid as these that were within them. 
Farther west than the house of the Black Friars was 



flMlton's jSnglanb 25 

the monastery of White Friars or Carmelites, and 
beyond these the ancient site of the Knights Tem- 
plar, whose Temple church, in Milton's day, as well 
as ours, alone remained. North of the Norman 
St. Bartholomew's was the house of the Carthusians, 
whose long history, ending in the Charterhouse, 
must be reserved to a later chapter. Northwest 
from the Norman house of St. Bartholomew's stood 
the Norman priory of St. John's of Jerusalem. 
Adjacent to it lay the twin foundation — the priory 
of Black Nuns. 

South of the Thames lay two great establish- 
ments, Bermondsey and St. Thomas's Hospital, 
while of the hospitals situated among the priories 
and monasteries to the north were the hospital of St. 
Mary of Bethlehem and the great hospital of St. 
Mary Spital, both of which were originally planned 
for religious houses. This is but a dry, brief cata- 
logue, not of all the great religious houses, but 
only of those whose walls, more or less transformed 
or ruined, were within walking distance and most 
familiar to the boy Milton in his rambles around 
the city of his birth. 

Milton must have seen several " colleges " as 
well as monasteries ; among these were St. Michael's 
College on Crooked Lane, and Jesus Commons, and 
a " college " for poor and aged priests, called the 



Lr=-. 



26 /HMlton's EnQla^ 

" Papey." A portion of the " college " of Whit- 
tington still remained, and on the site of the present 
Mercers' Chapel stood a college for the education 
of priests, whose splendid church remained until the 
Great Fire. 

Every lover of the beautiful must fondly dwell 
upon the glorious period of Gothic architecture 
during which these structures rose. Though London 
in the Tudor period eclipsed in wealth and magnifi- 
cence the city of earlier times, the Elizabethan age 
had no power in its development of pseudo-classic 
forms to equal the dignity and beauty of the Norman 
and Gothic work. Then the unknown reverent artist 
wrought not for fame or earthly glory, but dedicated 
his labour to the God of Nature, whose laws and 
principles were his chief guide. These were the 
days when vine and tendril and the subtle curves of 
leaf and flower or supple animal form suggested the 
enrichment of capital and corbel. No cheap and 
servile imitation of lute and drum, of spear and 
sword and ribbon, of casque and crown and plume, 
displayed a paucity of inventive genius and aban- 
donment of nature's teaching for that of milliner 
and armourer. Let John Ruskin, in many ways 
the spiritual son of the beauty-loving Puritan, John 
Milton, interpret to us the meaning of those poems 
reared in stone, which Milton's age was fast dis- 
placing : 



flDUton's lEnalanfc 27 

" You have in the earlier Gothic less wonderful 
construction, less careful masonry, far less expres- 
sion of harmony of parts in the balance of the 
building. Earlier work always has more or less 
of the character of a good, solid wall with irregular 
holes in it, well carved wherever there was room. 
But the last phase of Gothic has no room to spare ; 
it rises as high as it can on narrowest foundations, 
stands in perfect strength with the least possible 
substance in its bars ; connects niche with niche and 
line with line in an exquisite harmony from which 
no stone can be removed, and to which you can add 
not a pinnacle; and yet introduces in rich, though 
now more calculated profusion, the living elements 
of its sculpture, sculpture in quatrefoils, gargoyles, 
niches, in the ridges and hollows of its mouldings — 
not a shadow without meaning and not a line with- 
out life. But with this very perfection of his work 
came the unhappy pride of the builder in what he 
had done. As long as he had been merely raising 
clumsy walls and carving them, like a child, in way- 
wardness of fancy, his delight was in the things he 
thought of as he carved ; but when he had once 
reached this pitch of constructive science, he began 
to think only how cleverly he could put the stones 
together. The question was not now with him, 
What can I represent ? but, How high can I build — 



28 /iDilton's lEnglanfc 

how wonderfully can I hang this arch in air? and 
the catastrophe was instant — architecture became 
in France a mere web of woven lines, — in England 
a mere grating of perpendicular ones. Redundance 
was substituted for invention, and geometry for 
passion." ("The Two Paths.") 

It is in this later Gothic, for example the much 
admired Chapel of Henry VII. at Westminster, 
that we find this redundancy of motive and poverty 
of invention, as, for instance, in the repetition of the 
portcullis — the Tudor heraldic ornament. Ruskin 
would teach us that heraldic signs, though suited 
for a few conspicuous places, as proclaiming the 
name or rank or office of the owner, become imperti- 
nent when blazoned everywhere, and are wholly 
devoid of beauty when they reproduce by the hun- 
dred some instrument of prosaic use. 

Plantagenet London, and its many remnants of 
domestic architecture, in Milton's day, illustrated 
fully Ruskin's dictum that " Gothic is not an art 
for knights and nobles ; it is an art for the people ; 
it is not an art [merely] for churches and sanc- 
tuaries; it is an art for houses and homes. . . . 
When Gothic was invented houses were Gothic 
as well as churches. . . . Good Gothic has always 
been the work of the commonalty, not of the 
churches. . . . Gothic was formed in the baron's 



flMlton's Enslanfc 29 

castle and the burgher's street. It was formed by 
the thoughts and hands and powers of labouring 
citizens and warrior kings.'' (" Crown of Wild 
Olive.") 

In a memorable passage in his lectures on Archi- 
tecture in Edinburgh, Ruskin recalls the power with 
which the Gothic forms appeal to the imagination 
when embodied in poetry and romance. He asks 
what would result were the words tower and turret, 
and the mental pictures that they conjure up, re- 
moved. Suppose Walter Scott had written, instead 
of " the old clock struck two from a turret adjoin- 
ing my bedchamber," " the old clock struck two 
from the landing at the top of the stair." " What," 
he asks, "would have become of the passage?" 
" That strange and thrilling interest with which 
such words strike you as are in any wise connected 
with Gothic architecture, as for instance, vault, 
arch, spire, pinnacle, battlement, barbican, porch, — 
words everlastingly poetical and powerful, — is a 
most true and sure index that the things themselves 
are delightful to you." As to stylobates, and pedi- 
ments, and triglyphs, and all the classic forms, even 
when pure and unvulgarised by decadent Renais- 
sance work, how utterly they fail to satisfy the 
poetic instinct of the man of English lineage is well 
expressed by James Russell Lowell, as he stood 
within the portals of Chartres Minster : 



3° flDUton'8 England 

" The Grecian gluts me with its perfectness 
Unanswerable as Euclid, self-contained, 
The one thing finished in this hasty world. 
But ah ! this other, this that never ends, 
Still climbing, luring fancy still to climb, 
As full of morals, half divined, as life, 
Graceful, grotesque, with ever new surprise 
Of hazardous caprices, sure to please, 
Heavy as nightmare, airy light as fern, 
Imagination's very self in stone ! " 

Of the type of architecture most favoured by 
Milton's contemporaries, Ruskin says : 

" Renaissance architecture is the school which 
has conducted men's inventive and constructive 
faculties from the Grand Canal [in England, he 
might have said, old Chester or old Canterbury] to 
Gower Street, from the marble shaft and the lancet 
arch and the wreathed leafage ... to the square 
cavity in the brick wall." This is a strong expres- 
sion of a half truth. But the baldness and blankness 
of Gower Street and a thousand other streets is not 
so hopeless as the pretentious bastard Renaissance 
work which modern London shows. The rich mod- 
ern world can not plead poverty as its excuse for 
ugliness. Even the village cottage of three cen- 
turies ago, as well as the city streets, showed a 
popular love of beauty and a power to attain it 
which few architects, or rather few of their patrons, 
permit the modern world to see. 






/IDilton's England 3 1 

But let the lover of past beauty take new courage. 
Hundreds of signs disclose the dawn of a revival of 
true taste in which England and America bid fair 
to lead the world. 

Though in most of its forms the Renaissance art 
that accompanied the new age of discovery and 
expansion of commerce in the century before Milton 
indicates a decadence of the love of beauty, excep- 
tion must be made to much delightful domestic archi- 
tecture that has the Tudor stamp and is distinctly 
English, and unknown on the Continent. 

The introduction into the background of portraits 
of such classic outlines as domes, arches, and marble 
pilasters, is a device used by painters when they 
would flatter the vanity of their patrons and give 
them a courtly setting. No Byzantine or Norman 
arch, or Gothic spire or portal, however rich in dec- 
oration, can equal the severe but pompous lines of the 
Renaissance in conveying a sense of pride. Says 
Ruskin : " There is in them an expression of aristoc- 
racy in its worst characters : coldness, perfectness of 
training, incapability of emotion, want of sympathy 
with the weakness of lower men, blank, hopeless, 
haughty insufficiency. All these characters are writ- 
ten in the Renaissance architecture as plainly as if 
they were graven on it in words. For, observe, all 
other architectures have something in them that com- 



32 flDilton's EnQlanfc 

mon men can enjoy ; some concession to the simplici- 
ties of humanity, some daily bread for the hunger 
of the multitude; quaint fancy, rich ornament, 
bright colour, something that shows a sympathy 
with men of ordinary minds and hearts, and this 
wrought out, at least in the Gothic, with a rudeness 
showing that the workman did not mind exposing 
his own ignorance if he could please others. But the 
Renaissance is exactly the contrary of this. It is 
rigid, cold, inhuman; incapable of glowing, of stoop- 
ing, of conceding, for an instant. Whatever excel- 
lence it has is refined, high-trained, and deeply 
erudite, a kind which the architect well knows no 
common mind can taste. He proclaims it to you 
aloud. . . . All the pleasure you can have in any- 
thing I do is in its proud breeding, its rigid formal- 
ism, its perfect finish, its cold tranquillity. . . . And 
the instinct of the world felt this in a moment. . . . 
Princes delighted in it, and courtiers. The Gothic 
was good for God's worship, but this was good for 
man's worship. . . . The proud princes and lords 
rejoiced in it. It was full of insult to the poor in 
its every line. It would not be built of materials 
at the poor man's hand. ... It would be of hewn 
stone; it would have its windows and its doors and 
its stairs and its pillars in lordly order and of stately 
size." 



/IDtlton's En^lanS 33 

To the novice, who is beginning to decipher the 
inner meaning of sermons in stones in which the 
ages have recorded, all unconsciously, the life and 
aspiration of the past, these words may sound harsh 
and fantastic. 

With the memory of such rare geniuses as 
Michael Angelo and Wren, and their awe-inspiring 
cathedrals, built in the Renaissance forms, one may 
hesitate before completely accepting Ruskin's dictum. 
Ruskin himself has done homage to their genius and 
the greatness of their work. " There were of 
course," he says, " noble exceptions." Yet surely 
the devout Christian must feel under their glorious 
domes not so much like praying and reverencing his 
Maker as glorifying the work of men's hands. 
Under any dome and architectural reminder of 
Roman thought and life, whether it be Wren's 
mighty St. Paul's, or his small and exquisitely pro- 
portioned St. Stephen's, Wallbrook, almost in its 
shadow, the worshipper must feel something akin 
to Ruskin's sentiment. A meek and contrite heart 
feels alien and uncomforted amid its perfection. 

But Ruskin's word chiefly concerns the more per- 
fect Gothic of the Continent, and the manifestations 
there — worse than any in England — of riotous 
and insolent excess in its Renaissance work. The 
most ostentatious and offensive monument in West- 



34 flMlton's England 

minster Abbey, which is adorned with meaningless 
mouldings, artificial garlands, and cherubs weeping 
hypocritic tears, is not so odious as those which 
Venice, Rome, Antwerp, and a hundred other cities 
reared upon the Continent. Those tasteless, costly 
structures which modern Englishmen are but now 
learning to condemn illustrate completely the pride 
and arrogance of a world drunk with new wealth, 
in which fashion supplants beauty. 

Yet to a large extent the England of the splendid 
Tudor period and the England of the Stuarts sub- 
stituted for the beautiful and sincere forms of an 
earlier period a style of construction and decoration 
which showed distinct decadence. Witness the 
carvings in the chapel and dining-hall of the Charter- 
house, new in Milton's boyhood, the carvings in 
the dining-halls of the different Inns of Court, and 
mural tablets everywhere with their obese cherubs 
and ghastly death's heads. In the quaint beam and 
plaster front of Staple's Inn on Holborn still remains 
the ancient type of domestic architecture which ante- 
dated and accompanied Milton's boyhood. Hun- 
dreds of such cosy, homelike residences with their 
ample windows of many leaded panes lined the city 
streets. The merchants who lived in them sold their 
wares in the shops beneath, and, if they were artifi- 
cers, housed their apprentices within them. They 



/IDtlton'5 Englanfc 35 

were built solidly to last for centuries. Strong beams 
upheld the broad, low-studded ceilings. Capacious 
fireplaces opened into chimneys whose construction 
was often made a work of art. Around the house- 
door were carvings of saints or devils, of prophets, 
hobgoblins or grotesque dragons, of birds and bees, 
and any wild or lovely fancy that the craftsman 
loved to perpetuate in wood or stone. The home 
must be made beautiful as well as the sanctuary. In 
those days the mania of migration had not yet 
destroyed the permanence and sacredness of the 
homestead. Where the young man brought his 
bride, even in a city home, there he hoped to dwell 
and dandle his grandchildren upon his knee. It 
was Milton's fate to know many homes in London. 
Discoveries and travel of the Elizabethan period had 
broken many traditions of the past, and the old 
order in his day was yielding to the new. But half 
the architecture of two hundred years before him 
still remained, and all the traditions of the past were 
fresh. The dingy and mutilated relics of the time 
before the Tudors which, outside the Gothic 
churches, alone remain to us, reveal but little of 
what he saw. 

With Henry VIII. and the widespread and thor- 
ough dissolution of religious houses, London became 
a far more commercial and prosaic place. Green 



36 /HMlton'3 Englanfc 

convent gardens were sold for the erection of 
narrow wooden tenements ; ancient dormitories, 
refectories, and chapels were pulled down or trans- 
formed for more secular purposes. Crutched Friars' 
Church became a carpenter's shop and tennis court; 
Shakespeare and his friends erected a playhouse on 
the site of the Black Friars' monastery. A tavern 
replaced the church of St. Martin's le Grand, and 
far and wide traces of the despoiler and rebuilder 
were manifest. 

Stow had then but just written his invaluable 
chronicles, and little antiquarian interest prevailed. 
For the first time in human history men sailed 
around the globe. New worlds were opening to 
men's visions. Not only dreams of wealth without 
labour, but golden actualities had dazzled the imagi- 
nation of thousands. Drake and Hawkins, Fro- 
bisher and Raleigh were adding new lustre to an 
age hitherto unparalleled in prosperity and enter- 
prise. Emerson's description of the Englishman as 
having a " telescopic appreciation of distant gain " 
was exemplified. 

England was rich in poets, great even in Shake- 
speare's time. Of two hundred and forty who pub- 
lished verses, forty are remembered to-day. Yet 
of England's six million people, half could not read 
at all. Never was there among people of privilege 



flDilton's England 37 

such a proportion of accomplished men. Every man 
tried his hand at verses, and learned to sing a madri- 
gal, and tinkle the accompaniment with his own 
fingers. Gentlemen travelled to Italy and brought 
back or made themselves translations of Boccaccio, 
Ariosto, Tasso. Not only learned ladies like Queen 
Elizabeth, who had had Roger Ascham for instruc- 
tor, wrote Latin, but many others were accomplished 
in those severer studies which ladies in a later age 
neglected. 

Sir Walter Besant tells us that from Henry IV. 
to Henry VIII. herbs, fruits, and roots were scarcely 
used. At this period, however, the poor again began 
to consume melons, radishes, cucumbers, parsley, 
carrots, turnips, salad herbs, and these things as 
well graced the tables of the gentry. Potatoes were 
unknown until a much later time. Much meat was 
eaten, and in different fashion from our own, e. g., 
honey was poured over mutton. Tobacco cost 
eighteen shillings a pound, and King James com- 
plained that there were those who " spent £300 a 
year upon this noxious weed." No vital statistics 
existed to show the average of longevity. But cer- 
tain it is that, with modern sanitation and cleanli- 
ness, the great modern London, which to-day houses 
about as many souls as did all England then, has 
a much lower death-rate. When one remembers 



38 flMlton's JEnglanfc 

that, spite of stupendous intellectual attainments, of 
exquisite taste in art and literature, spite of wise 
statesmanship and all manly virtues, the wise men 
of that day were children in their knowledge of 
chemistry and medicine, we cannot wonder at the 
recurrence of the plague in almost every generation. 

In 1605 the bills of mortality included the ninety- 
seven parishes within the walls, sixteen parishes 
without the walls, and six contiguous outparishes in 
Middlesex and Surrey. During Milton's lifetime, 
they included the city of Westminster and the par- 
ishes of Islington, Lambeth, Stepney, Newington, 
Hackney, and Redriff. Scarlet fever was formerly 
confounded with measles, and does not appear to be 
reported as a separate disease until 1703. 

In 1682 Sir William Petty, speaking of the five 
plagues that had visited London in the preceding 
hundred years, remarks : " It is to be remembered 
the plagues of London do commonly kill one-fifth 
of the inhabitants, and are the chief impediment 
against the growth of the city." 

In Milton's boyhood common folk were crowded 
into such narrow, wooden tenements as one may still 
see within the enclosure of St. Giles's Church, Crip- 
plegate, — almost the only ones that still remain 
within the city. There were no sewers and no ade- 
quate pavement until 161 6. House refuse was not 



flDUton's England 39 

infrequently thrown into the street, and sometimes 
upon the heads of passers-by, though ancient laws 
enjoined each man to keep the front of his house 
clean and to throw no refuse into the gutter. In 
short, ideas on sanitation in London were much like 
those in Havana before the summer of 1898. 

It is difficult to obtain accurate statistics of the 
population of London, but Loftie estimates that in 
1636 seven hundred thousand people lived " within 
its liberties." 

Where now lofty, gray stone buildings of pre- 
tentious and nondescript architecture shelter banks 
and offices, gabled buildings with overlapping stories 
darkened the streets. The city was not dependent 
on the suburbs or upon other towns for aught but 
food and raw material. Wool and silk and linen, 
leather and all metals were wrought close to the 
shops where they were sold. The odours of glue 
and dyestufTs tainted the fresh air. The sound of 
tools and hammers, and of the simple looms and 
machinery of the day, worked by foot or hand power, 
were heard. 

New objects of luxury began to be manufactured 
— fans, ladies' wigs, fine knives, pins, needles, 
earthen fire-pots, silk and crystal buttons, shoe- 
buckles, glassware, nails, and paper. New products 
from foreign lands were introduced and naturalised 



4o flDUton's England 

— among them, turkeys, hops, and apricots. Forks 
had not yet appeared as a necessary table furnishing. 
Kissing was a universal custom, and a guest kissed 
his hostess and all ladies present. 

Though in the time of Milton's father the ameni- 
ties of life had much increased, cruelty and severe 
punishments were more frequent than in an earlier 
age. Three-fourths of all the heretics burned at 
the stake in England suffered in those five years 
of the bloody queen who, with her Spanish husband 
at her court, ruled from 1553 to 1558 over unhappy 
England. Many a time must the boy Milton have 
heard blood-curdling tales from aged men of these 
ghastly days when Ridley, Cranmer, Hooper, and 
John Rogers withered in the flames. His own 
father may have seen the later martyrdoms of Roman 
Catholics in Elizabeth's reign, or of that Unitarian 
in 1585 who suffered at the stake for the denial of 
the divinity of Christ — a theological view with 
which Milton himself is shown to have had much 
sympathy. 

The historian tells us of men boiled and women 
burned for poisoning; of ears nailed to the pillory 
and sliced off for libellous and incendiary language. 
We read of frightful floggings through the streets 
and of an enormous number of men hanged. Many 
rogues escaped punishment altogether, for, though 



Anton's England 41 

punishment when it came was terrifically out of 
proportion to the offence, and in its publicity incited 
by suggestion to more crime., the law was often 
laxly administered. 

All periods are more or less transitional, but the 
England into which Milton came in the first years 
of the seventeenth century was peculiarly in a state 
of transformation and unsettlement. As in the be- 
ginning of the twentieth century, men's minds were 
receiving radical, new impressions, and had not yet 
assimilated or comprehended them. The doctrines 
of religious and political freedom were the dreams 
of prophets, and were yet to be conceived a possi- 
bility by the masses, who through dumb centuries 
had toiled and laughed and wept, and then stretched 
themselves in mother earth and slept among their 
fathers. The tender, growing shoots which in the 
days of YViclif had sprung from the seed, small as a 
mustard seed, which he had planted, had grown. 
Birds now lodged among its branches. The time 
was ripening when, with the axe and hammer of 
Milton and his mighty- compeers, some of its timbers 
should help rear a new structure for church and 
state; and others should be driven deep under the 
foundations of the temple which men of English 
blood should in the future rear to democracv. 




CHAPTER II. 

milton's life on bread street 

rlRECTLY under the shadow of St. Mary 
le Bow Church, and almost within bow- 
shot of old St. Paul's, in a little court off 
Bread Street, three doors from Cheapside, John 
Milton, the son of John Milton, scrivener, was born, 
December 9th in 1608. The house was marked by 
the sign of a spread eagle, probably adopted from 
the armorial bearings of the family, which appear 
on the original agreement for the publication of 
" Paradise Lost." John Milton, scrivener, whose 
business was much like that of the modern attorney, 
was the son of a well-to-do Catholic yeoman of 
Oxfordshire, and is said to have studied for a time 
at Christ Church, Oxford. Certain it is that he 
turned Protestant, was cast off by his father, and 
in Elizabeth's reign settled in London; by 1600, 
when he married his wife Sarah, the worldly goods 
with which he her endowed in the church of All 
Hallows, Bread Street, included two houses on that 
street, besides others elsewhere. 



jfflMlton's JEnglant) 43 

We know little of Milton's mother, except that 
she was a woman of a warm heart and generous 
hand, and had weak eyes -'which compelled her to 
wear spectacles before she was thirty, while her 
husband read without them at the age of eighty- 
four. Three of their six little ones died in baby- 
hood, but the little John's elder sister, Anne, and 
younger brother, Christopher, grew with him to 
middle life. 

It was a musical household; an organ and other 
instruments were part of the possessions most 
highly prized in the Bread Street home. The little 
lad must have looked with pride at the gold chain 
and medal presented to his father by a Polish prince 
for a composition in forty parts which the former 
had written for him. Many chimes in country 
churches played the psalm tunes that he had har- 
monised. To this day a madrigal and other songs 
of his are known to music lovers. No wonder that 
the boy reared in this home was ever a lover of 
sweet sounds, and learned to evoke them with his 
own little fingers upon the organ keyboard. 

The Bread Street of Milton's day, though swept 
over by the Great Fire, was not obliterated, and 
still covers its old site. Just at the head of it, on 
Cheapside, stood the " Standard in Cheap " — an 
ancient monument in hexagonal shape, with sculp- 



44 /HMlton's JEnglan& 

tures on each side, and on the top the figure of a man 
blowing a horn. Here Wat Tyler and Jack Cade 
had beheaded prisoners. A little west was the 
Gothic Cross in Cheap, one of the nine crosses 
erected in memory of Queen Eleanor, somewhat 
similar to the modern one at Charing Cross. 

Only a few steps from his father's house the 
little John found himself in the thickest traffic and 
bustle of the city. Here were mercers' and gold- 
smiths' shops, and much coming and going of carts, 
and occasionally coaches, which, as the antiquarian 
Stow declared, " were running on wheels with many 
whose parents had been glad to go on foot," for 
coaches were but newly come into fashion. As the 
little lad stood at the street corner looking east and 
west along Cheapside, — the ancient market-place, — 
his eye fell on well-built houses three and four stories 
high; they were turned gable end to the street, 
were built of timber, brick, and plaster, and had 
projecting upper stories of woodwork. Stow de- 
scribes a row built by Thomas Wood, goldsmith, 
of " fair large houses, for the most part possessed 
of mercers," and westward, beginning at Bread 
Street, " the most beautiful frame of fair houses 
and shops that be within the walls of London or 
elsewhere in England. It containeth in number ten 
fair dwelling-houses and fourteen shops, all in one 



/IDilton's Englanfc 45 

frame, uniformly builded, four stories high, beau- 
tified toward the street with the goldsmiths' arms 
and the likeness of woodmen, in memory of his 
name, riding on monstrous beasts; all of which is 
cast in lead, richly painted over and gilt." 

The modern visitor, as he turns from the jostling 
crowds of Cheapside into Bread Street, which is 
scarcely wider than a good sidewalk, will find no 
trace of aught that Milton saw. The present mer- 
cantile establishment, at numbers 58-63, that covers 
the site of his house, covers as well the whole Spread 
Eagle Court, in which it stood. It bears no inscrip- 
tion, but, if one enters, the courteous proprietor may 
conduct him to the second story where a bust of 
Milton is placed over the spot where he was born. 

A little farther south, on the corner of Watling 
Street, is the site of All Hallows Church, where 
Milton was baptised, and which is marked by a 
gray stone bust of the poet and the inscription : 

" Milton 

Born in Bread Street 

1608 

Baptised in Church of All Hallows 

Which Stood here Ante 

1878." 

The register of his baptism referred to him as 
" John, sonne of John Mylton, Scrivener." 



46 flbflton's JEngla^ 

Here the Milton family sat every Sunday and 
listened to the sermons of Reverend Richard Stocke, 
a zealous Puritan and most respected man, who is 
said to have had the gift of influencing young people. 

Further south, on the same side as All Hallows, 
were " six almshouses builded for poor decayed 
brethren of the Salter's Company," and beyond this 
the church of St. Mildred, the Virgin. Upon cross- 
ing Basing Lane, Milton saw the most noted house 
upon the street, known as " Gerrard Hall." This 
was an antique structure " built upon arched vaults 
and with arched gates of stone brought from Caen 
in Normandy," as Stow relates. A giant is said 
to have lived here, and the large fir pole in the high 
hall, which reached to the roof, was said to have 
been his staff. Stow thought it worth while to 
measure it, and declares it was fifteen inches in cir- 
cumference. Small boys in Bread Street may well 
have stood in awe of such a cane. 

Whether the famous " Mermaid " Tavern was in 
Bread or Friday Street or between them seems 
doubtful, but Ben Jonson's lines plainly indicate 
Bread Street: 

" At Bread-street's Mermaid having dined and merry, 
Proposed to go to Holborn in a wherry." 

As Milton was early destined for the Church, 
his unusually thoughtful disposition and quick per- 









South ^n.yi/,, . W- «>/„„. /^fyucciwf,,* 



OLD ST. PAUL'S CATHEDRAL 
The two upper views show the porch by Inigo Jones. The two lower 
views show the " Lesser Cloisters." Milton's school stood at the rear of 
the church. 

From an old engraving-. 



/IMlton's Enalatto 47 

ception must have given promise of his fulfillment 
of his father's hope. At the age of ten he was 
writing verses. At this time, a Dutch painter, 
Jansen, reputed to be " equal to Van Dyck in all 
except freedom of hand and grace," was employed 
to paint the scrivener's little son, as well as James I. 
and his children and various noblemen. 

This portrait shows us a sweet-faced, sober little 
Puritan in short-cropped auburn hair, wearing a 
broad lace frill about his neck, and an elaborately 
braided jacket. This portrait is now in private 
hands, from whence it is to be hoped that it will 
some day find its way to the National Portrait Gal- 
lery, and be placed beside the striking and noble 
likeness of the poet in middle life. 

The lines which were written beneath the first 
engraving of it may have been the poet's own : 

" When I was yet a child, no childish play 
To me was pleasing ; all my mind was set 
Serious to learn and know, and thence to do 
What might be public good ; myself I thought 
Born to that end, born to promote all truth 
And righteous things." 

Milton appears to have been very fond of his 
preceptor, a Scotch Puritan named Young. He 
seems to have well grounded the lad in Latin, 
aroused in him a love of poetry, and set him to 



48 flMlton's Englano 

making English and Latin verses. But the little 
John must go to school with other boys ; and what 
more natural than that the famous St. Paul's 
School, within five minutes' walk, should have been 
selected ? 

When Milton went to school in 1620, St. Paul's 
Cathedral was become old and much in need of 
restoration. It had been built on the site of an older 
church and was in process of erection and alteration 
from about 1090 to 15 12, when its new wooden 
steeple, covered with lead, was completed. Its cross 
was estimated later by Wren to have been at least 460 
feet from the ground. This had disappeared in a 
fire in 1561, and none replaced it. What Milton 
saw was a huge edifice, chiefly Gothic, with a 
central tower about 260 feet high. The classical 
porch by Inigo Jones was not added, neither were 
certain buildings which abutted the nave torn down 
until after Milton's school-days were over. On 
the east end, next his schoolhouse, was a great 
window thirty-seven feet high, above which was a 
circular rose window. The choir stretched west- 
ward 224 feet, which, with the nave, made the entire 
length 580 feet. When Jones's portico was added, 
its whole length was 620 feet. The area which it 
covered was 82,000 feet, and it was by far the larg- 
est cathedral in all England. Upon the southwest 



flBtlton's Enolanb 49 

corner was a tower once used as a prison, and also 
as a bell and clock tower. This was the real 
Lollards' tower, rather than the one at Lambeth 
which is so called. The northwest tower was like- 
wise a prison. The nave was of transitional Nor- 
man design, of twelve bays in length, and with 
triforium and clerestory. For many decades a 
large part of the cathedral was desecrated by a 
throng of hucksters, idlers, and fops. 

Ben Jonson makes constant allusion to " Paul's." 
Here he studied the extravagant costumes of the 
clay. According to Dekker, the tailors frequented 
its aisles to catch the newest fashions : " If you 
determine to enter into a new suit, warn your tailor 
to attend you in Paul's, who with his hat in his 
hand, shall like a spy discover the stuff, colour, and 
fashion of any doublet or hose that dare be seen 
there; and stepping behind a pillar to fill his table- 
book with those notes, will presently send you into 
the world an accomplished man." 

Bishop Earle, writing when Milton was twenty 
years of age, describes St. Paul's as follows : " It is 
a heap of stones and men with a vast confusion of 
languages; and were the steeple not sanctified, 
nothing liker Babel. The noise in it is like that 
of bees mixed of walking tongues and feet. It is 
the exchange of all discourse, and no business what- 



5° flDtlton's Englanfc 

soever but is here stirring and afoot. It is the market 
of young lecturers, whom you may cheapen here at 
all rates and sizes. All inventions are emptied here, 
and not few pockets. The best sign of a temple in 
it is that it is the thieves' sanctuary." 

Well may John Milton senior have cautioned his 
young son not to tarry in " Duke Humphrey's 
Walk," as this scene of confusion was called, on his 
way home from school, though he may well have 
taken him to inspect the lofty tomb of Dean Colet 
or the monuments to John of Gaunt and Duke 
Humphrey and the shrine of St. Erkenwald, 
which was behind the high altar. As a man, in 
later years, Milton may have walked down from 
Aldersgate on a December in 1641 and attended the 
funeral of the great painter, Sir Anthony Van 
Dyck, who for nine years had made his residence 
in England, and was buried here. 

In a corner of the churchyard stood a covered 
pulpit surmounted by a cross, where in ancient times 
the folkmote of the citizens was held. For centuries 
before Milton, this was a famous spot for outdoor 
sermons and proclamations. Here the captured 
flags from the Armada had waved above the 
preacher. But in 1629, when Milton was in Cam- 
bridge, Oliver Cromwell, in his maiden speech in 
Parliament, declared that flat popery was being 



flMlton's England) S 1 

preached at Paul's Cross. When Cromwell's clay 
of power was come, and the cathedral during the 
war was sometimes used to stable horses, Paul's 
Cross was swept away, and its leaden roof melted 
into bullets. Before that, in 1633, preaching had 
been removed from there into the choir. 

Of the architecture of the bishop's palace, which 
stood at the northeast of the cathedral, we know 
nothing, but we know that it existed in Milton's 
school-days. Adjoining the palace was a " Haw," 
or small enclosure surrounded by a cloister, filled 
with tombs, and upon the walls was a grisly picture 
of the Dance of Death. Death was represented by 
a skeleton, who led the Pope, and emperor, and 
a procession of men of all conditions. In brief, 
the little " Haw " was a small edition of the Pisan 
Campo Santo. 

At the east end of the churchyard stood the 
Bell Tower, surmounted by a spire covered with lead 
and bearing a statue of St. Paul. The cloister of 
the Chapter House or Convocation House hid the 
west wall of the south transept and part of the nave. 
It was, unlike most structures of that character, 
two stories in height, and formed a square of some 
ninety feet, which was called the " Lesser Cloisters," 
doubtless to distinguish it from the other cloisters 
in the " Haw." During his most impressionable 



52 flDUton's EnfllanC* 

years, the city boy John Milton could not have 
stirred from home without being confronted by 
majestic symbols of the Christian faith, and mighty 
structures already venerable with age, and rich in 
treasures of a great historic past. Religion and 
beauty played as large a part in the influences that 
moulded the life of his young contemporaries as 
science and athletics do in the life of every American 
boy to-day. Whatever faults the methods of educa- 
tion in Milton's age may be accused of, it can not 
be denied that they developed industry, reverence, 
and moral courage — three qualities which with all 
our child study and pedagogical improvements are 
perhaps less common to-day than they were then. 
About the year 1620, when William Bradford 
was writing his famous journal, and John Carver 
and Edward Winslow were sailing with him in the 
Mayflower, when Doctor Harvey had told Lon- 
don folk that man's blood circulates, and many 
new things were being noised abroad, twelve-year- 
old John Milton first went to school. His school 
had been founded in 15 12 by Dean Colet, whose 
great tomb, just mentioned, was but a stone's throw 
distant. It was a famous school. Ben Jonson and 
the famous Camden had studied there, and learned 
Latin and Greek, the catechism, and good manners. 
There were 153 boys in all; the number prescribed 



ADUton's JEnglanfc 53 

had reference, curiously, to the number of fishes in 
Simon Peter's miraculous draught. Over the win- 
dows were inscribed the words in large capital let- 
ters : " Schola Catechizationis Puerorum In Christi 
Opt. Max. Fide Et Bonis Literis. On entering, the 
pupils were confronted by the motto painted on 
each window : " Aut Doce, Aut Disce, Aut Discede " 
— either teach or learn or leave the place. There 
were two rooms, one called the vestibulum, for the 
little boys, where also instruction was given in 
Christian manners. In the main schoolroom the 
master sat at the further end upon his imposing 
chair of office called a cathedra, and under a bust of 
Colet said to have been a work of " exquisite art." 
Stow tells us that somewhat before Milton's time 
the master's wages were a mark a week and a 
livery gown of four nobles delivered in cloth; his 
lodgings were free. The sub-master received 
weekly six shillings, eight pence, and was given 
his gown. Children of every nationality were eligi- 
ble; on admission they passed an examination in 
reading, writing, and the catechism, and paid four 
pence, which went to the poor scholar who swept 
the school. The eight classes included boys from 
eight to eighteen years of age, though the curriculum 
of the school extended over only six years. Milton's 
master was Doctor Alexander Gill, who from 1608- 



54 flMlton's JEnolanfc 

1635 held the mastership of St. Paul's School. A 
progressive man was this same reverend gentleman 
— a great believer in his native English and in 
spelling reform. Speaking of Latin, this remark- 
able Latin master said : " We may have the same 
treasure in our own tongue. I love Rome, but 
London better. I favour Italy, but England more. 
I honour the Latin, but worship the English." He 
was also an advocate of the retention of good old 
Saxon words as against the invasion of Latinised 
ones. " But whither," he writes, " have you ban- 
ished those words which our forefathers used for 
these new-fangled ones? Are our words to be 
exiled like our citizens? O ye Englishmen, retain 
what yet remains of our native speech!" Under 
Mr. Gill's instruction, and that of his son, who was 
usher, Milton spent about four years of strenuous 
study. So great was his ambition for learning 
during the years when most boys find school hours 
alone irksome enough that he says : " My father 
destined me when a little boy for the study of 
humane letters, which I seized with such eagerness 
that from the twelfth year of my age I scarcely 
ever went from my lessons to bed before mid- 
night; which indeed was the first cause of injury 
to my eyes, to whose natural weakness there were 
also added frequent headaches." Philips writes: 




DEAN COLET, 

From a plaster < 



THE FOUNDER OF ST. Pj 

■ist of the group sculptured by Ha 



UL S SCHOOL 
no Thornycroft. 



/IMlton's England 55 

" He generally sat up half the night as well in 
voluntary improvements of his own choice as the 
exact perfecting of his school exercises; so that at 
the age of fifteen he was full ripe for academical 
training." During these years the boy probably 
learned French and Italian, as well as made a begin- 
ning in Hebrew. 

. It was in his last year at school that he para- 
phrased the ninety-fourth Psalm, beginning: 

" When the blest seed of Terah's faithful son 
After long toil their liberty had won, 
And passed from Pharian fields to Canaan's land 
Led by the strength of the Almighty's hand, 
Jehovah's wonders were in Israel shown, 
His praise and glory were in Israel known." 

Likewise Psalm one hundred and thirty-six, be- 
ginning : 

" Let us with a gladsome mind 

Praise the Lord, for he is kind : 

For his mercies aye endure, 

Ever faithful, ever sure." 

The present St. Paul's School is now splendidly 
housed in a great establishment in Hammersmith. 
But Milton's school and the one which arose on 
its ashes after the Great Fire are remembered by 
the following inscription : " On this site, A. D. 15 12 
to A. D. 1884, stood St. Paul's School, founded by 



56 rtMlton's England) 

Dr. John Colet, Dean of St. Paul's." From the 
studio of Mr. Hamo Thornycroft at Kensington, 
whence came the heroic figures of Cromwell at 
Westminster and King Alfred at Winchester, St. 
Paul's School is to receive a noble statue of the 
great scholar. 




CHAPTER III. 

MILTON AT CAMBRIDGE 

5 HE schoolmate whom Milton most loved 
was a physician's son, Charles Diodati, 
almost exactly his own age, who went to 
Cambridge a little in advance of him. 

After his sister, who was then eighteen years old, 
had been wooed and won by Mr. Philips, and had 
made the first break in the home on Spread Eagle 
Court, Milton, now sixteen years old, followed his 
friend to Cambridge. Doubtless he rode on the 
coach, which every week the hale old stage-coach 
driver — Hobson — drove from the Bull's Inn on 
Bishopsgate Street. A well-to-do man was this 
worthy, who, in spite of eighty winters, still cracked 
his whip behind his span, and kept forty horses in 
his livery stable. Milton took a great fancy to 
him. He soon learned, as did every young gentle- 
man intent on hiring a nag, that " Hobson's choice " 
meant taking the horse that stood nearest the stable 
door. Hobson is said to have been the first man 
in England to let out hackney-coaches. The modern 
57 



53 flDtlton'3 England 

visitor to the university town finds the old carrier 
honoured by a memorial; for he became a public 
benefactor, and among many generous gifts be- 
queathed a sum that to this day provides for a 
fine conduit and for the runnels of sparkling water 
that flow along the streets and around the town. 1 
Under the mastership of Doctor Thomas Bain- 
brigge, Milton became a " lesser pensioner " in 
February, 1624, at Christ's College. Students were 
classified according to social rank and ability to 
pay, and Milton stood above the poorer students, 
called " sizars," who had inferior accommodation ; 
he probably paid about £50 a year for his 

1 ONE OF MILTON'S TWO EPITAPHS ON HOBSON 
" Here lies old Hobson. Death hath broke his girt, 
And here, alas, hath laid him in the dirt ; 
Or else, the ways being foul, twenty to one, 
He's here stuck in a slough, or overthrown. 
'Twas such a shifter, that if truth were known, 
Death was half glad when he had got him down ; 
For he had any time these ten years full, 
Dodged with him, betwixt Cambridge and the ' Bull,' 
And surely death could never have prevailed, 
Had not his weekly course of carriage failed. 
But lately finding him so long at home, 
And thinking now his journey's end was come, 
And that he had ta'en up his latest inn, 
In the kind office of a chamberlain, 
Showed him his room, where he must lodge that night, 
Pulled off his boots and took away the light ; 
If any ask for him, it shall be said, 
' Hobson has supt and's newly gone to bed.' " 



flMlton's England 59 

maintenance. Christ's College, as regards numbers, 
then stood nearly at the head of the sixteen col- 
leges and had one master, thirteen fellows, and 
fifty-five scholars, which, together with students, 
made the number two hundred and sixty, about the 
same that it has to-day. It stands between Sidney 
Sussex College and Emmanuel. In the former, 
Cromwell studied, from April, 1616, to July, 16 17, 
and the room with its bay window and deep 
window-seats and little bedroom opening out of 
it, which is said to have been his, may still 
be seen in the second story of the building next 
to the street. The window is modern. His por- 
trait, painted in middle life, hangs in the dining- 
hall. Doctor William Everett, in what is the best 
book on life in Cambridge, — his " On the Cam," — 
thus sums up his estimate of the Protector : " Bigots 
may defame him, tyrants may insult him, but when 
the hosts of God rise for their great review and 
the champions of liberty bear their scars, there shall 
stand in the foremost rank, shining as the brightness 
of the firmament, the majestic son of Cambridge, 
the avenger and protector, Oliver Cromwell." A 
Royalist has written in a note that is appended to 
Cromwell's name in the college books: "Hie fuit 
grandis Me impostor camifex perditissimus ; " and 
it is as " impostor " and " butcher " that two-thirds 



60 flMlton's En^lanS 

of Englishmen would have described him before 
Carlyle resurrected the real man. 

Emmanuel College is preeminently the Puritan 
college. It is clear to Americans as the one where 
William Blackstone, the learned hermit of Shawmut, 
John Harvard, the founder of Harvard College, 
and Henry Dunster, its first president, Bradstreet, 
the colonial governor, and Hugh Peters, the regi- 
cide, who lived in Boston, once studied. Here 
also Thomas Hooker, the founder of Connecticut, 
was a student, and here John Cotton was a fellow. 
This beloved preacher afterward left his ministry 
over St. Botolph's Church in Boston, England, to 
go to the little settlement of Winthrop's, which 
had changed its earlier names of " Shawmut " and 
" Trimountaine " to " Boston " before his arrival. 
American tourists, who find their way to the 
spacious grounds of Jesus College to see the Burne- 
Jones and Morris windows in the chapel, will be 
glad to note that in these stately halls John Eliot 
walked a student. Little he then dreamed of his 
future life in wigwams, a guest of mugwumps, in 
the forests of Natick, Massachusetts, and of the 
laborious years to be spent in turning Hebrew poetry 
and history and gospel message into their barbar- 
ous tongue. Francis Higginson, the minister to 
Salem, and the ancestor of Colonel Thomas W. 



/Alton's Enalanfc 61 

Higginson, studied here as well. John Winthrop, 
the governor of the Massachusetts colony, and 
President Chauncy of Harvard College studied at 
Trinity a generation before Wren erected its great 
library, and Isaac Newton was a student there. 
John Norton, Cotton's successor at the First Church, 
Boston, studied in Peterhouse, the oldest of all the 
colleges, and Roger Williams, the founder of Rhode 
Island, entered Pembroke College the year before 
Milton entered Christ's. Whether the two, whose 
lives were to touch so closely later, knew each other 
then or not is doubtful. William Brewster was the 
only man who came in the Mayflower who had a 
college education. He too studied at Cambridge; 
and so did John Robinson, the dearly loved pastor 
of the Pilgrims, who remained with the other Eng- 
lish refugees at Leyden. 

It was these men, with Shepard, Saltonstall, and 
a score more of Oxford and Cambridge men, who 
were the spiritual fathers of Samuel Adams, Warren, 
Otis, Hancock ; of Jonathan Edwards, Ralph Waldo 
Emerson, Channing, Beecher, and Phillips Brooks; 
of Lowell, Longfellow, Whittier, Bryant, Holmes, 
and Hawthorne; of Garrison, Phillips, and Sumner; 
of Motley, Bancroft, Prescott, and John Fiske. 
The Cambridge that Milton knew was the mother 
and the grandmother of the founders of states 



62 flDilton's England 

and of the architects of national constitutions and 
ideals. 

Though most of the New England Puritan leaders 
came from Cambridge, Oxford furnished several of 
the great Puritans who remained at home — Pym, 
Vane, John Eliot, and Hampden. 

It is estimated that nearly one hundred university 
men, between 1630 and 1647, left their comfortable 
homes and the allurements that Oxford, Cambridge, 
and the picturesque England of their time presented, 
to undergo the hardships of pioneers in the raw 
colony upon Massachusetts Bay. Of these, two- 
thirds came from Cambridge, a particularly large 
proportion from Emmanuel College. Of the forty 
or fifty Cambridge or Oxford men who were in 
Massachusetts in 1639, one-half were within five 
miles of Boston or Cambridge. It was this element 
of culture and character that determined the history 
of New England, and forced its stony soil to bring 
forth such a crop of men in the ages that were to 
come as made New England, in the words of Mau- 
rice, " the realisation in plain prose of the dreams 
which haunted Milton his whole life long." 

Sidney Sussex, Christ's, and Emmanuel Colleges 
were erected during the Tudor period, Christ's Col- 
lege, founded in 1505, being the earliest of the three. 
The buildings of the latter now present a more 





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/HMlton's England 6 3 

commonplace appearance than when the " Lady of 
Christ's," as the students called young Milton, 
walked among them in his cap and gown. One still 
may climb the narrow, shabby stairway to the room, 
with a tiny, irregular bedroom and cupboard, where 
Milton lived, and which probably he shared with 
a roommate. It has no inscription or special mark, 
and probably few strangers seek it out. The visitor 
will note its two windows opposite each other, whose 
heavy window-frames, with the wainscoting and 
cornice, bear mark of age. 

No one, however, fails to seek within the secluded 
inner garden the decrepit mulberry-tree, which is 
said to have been planted by Milton. Its trunk is 
muffled high in a mound of sod, and its aged limbs, 
which still bear foliage and black berries, rest on 
supports. High, sheltering walls shut in the exqui- 
site green lawns around it, and birds, blossoms, and 
trees make the spot seem a paradise regained. 

Among the students of Christ's College, none in 
later years brought it such renown as two men of 
widely differing types — the authors of " Evidences 
of Christianity " and " The Origin of Species." 
William Paley in 1766, when he was but twenty- 
three years old, was elected a fellow, and remained 
in Cambridge ten years. His famous work to-day 
forms part of the subjects required for the " Little 



64 flDilton's Encjianfc 

Go." Charles Robert Darwin, the Copernicus of the 
nineteenth century, entered Christ's with the inten- 
tion of studying for the ministry. He left it to 
journey on the Beagle through the southern seas, 
and to bring back results which, with his later study, 
led to such a revolution in human thought as made 
it only second to that wrought in the minds of men 
who lived a generation before Milton was born. 

Masson tells us that in Milton's college days the 
daily routine was chapel service at five o'clock in 
the morning, followed sometimes by a discourse by 
one of the fellows, then breakfasts, probably served 
in the students' own rooms, as they are to-day. 
This was followed by the daily college lectures or 
university debates, which lasted until noon, when 
dinner was served in the college dining-halls ; there 
the young men, then as now. sat upon the hard, 
backless benches, and drank their beer beneath 
painted windows and portraits, perchance by Hol- 
bein, of the eminent men who had been their 
predecessors. 

After dinner, if they supped at seven, and attended 
evening service, they could do much as they pleased 
otherwise. In Milton's day. the rule of an earlier 
time, which prescribed that out of their chambers 
students should converse in some dead language, 
had been much relaxed. Probably the barbarous 



flMlton's England 6 5 

Latin and worse Greek and Hebrew, which this pre- 
scription must have caused, finally rendered it a 
dead letter. Smoking was a universal practice, and 
boxing matches, dancing, bear fights, and other for- 
bidden games were not unknown. Bathing in the 
sedgy little Cam was prohibited, but was neverthe- 
less a daily practice. 

In many colleges the undergraduates wore " new 
fashioned gowns of any colour whatsoever, blue or 
green, or red or mixt, without any uniformity but in 
hanging sleeves ; and their other garments light and 
gay, some with boots and spurs, others with stock- 
ings of divers colours reversed one upon another." 
Some had " fair roses upon the shoe, long frizzled 
hair upon the head, broad spread bands upon their 
shoulders, and long, large merchants' ruffs about 
their necks, with fair feminine cuffs at the wrist." 

The portrait of Milton, which hangs in a spacious 
apartment used by the dons at Christ's College, 
shows him a youth of rare beauty, in a rich and 
tasteful costume with broad lace collar. He holds a 
gilt-edged volume in his hand, and has the mien 
of a refined and elegant scholar, but not effeminate 
withal, for he was used to daily sword practice. 

Corporal punishment was then still in vogue, and 
delinquents under eighteen years old were not 
infrequently chastised in public. In fact, at Trinity 



66 flDUton's lEngiarto 

College, " there was a regular service of corporal 
punishment in the hall every Thursday evening at 
seven in the presence of all the undergraduates." 
Masson discredits the story that Milton was once 
subjected to corporal punishment. 

In Milton's day the old order was changing, and 
we note that on Fridays men ate meat, and that 
the clergy indulged in impromptu prayers, to the 
scandal of the good churchmen. It was complained 
that " they lean or sit or kneel at prayers, every 
man in a several posture as he pleases ; at the name 
of Jesus, few r will bow, and when the Creed is 
repeated, many of the boys, by men's directions, 
turn to the west door." 

Milton seems to have attended plays at the 
university, and to have been a critical observer. 
Toland quotes him as saying : " So many of the 
young divines and those in next aptitude to Divinity 
have been seen so often on the stage writhing and 
unboning their Clergy Lims to all the antic and 
dishonest Gestures of Trinculos, Buffoons, and 
bands; prostituting the shame of that ministry 
which either they had or were nigh having, to the 
eyes of Courtiers and Court Ladies, with their 
grooms and Mademoiselles. There where they acted 
and overacted among other young Scholars, I was 
a Spectator; they thought themselves gallant Men 



flDtlton's England 67 

and I thought them Fools ; they made sport, and 
I laughed; they mispronounced, and I misliked; 
and to make up the Atticisms, they were out and I 
hist." 

It is the boast of Cambridge that she educated 
Cranmer, Latimer, and Ridley, the three martyrs 
whom Oxford burned. It must likewise be noted 
that Erasmus, Spenser, Coke, Walsingham, and 
Burleigh were Cambridge men. 

The Cambridge of Milton's time was but a small 
town of seven thousand inhabitants, about one-sixth 
of its present size, but rich with a history of nearly 
six hundred years. Its most beautiful building then 
as now was King's College Chapel — in fact, the 
most beautiful building in either Oxford or Cam- 
bridge, despite Mr Ruskin's just criticism upon it. 
No doubt, it would look less like a dining-table 
bottom-side up, with its four legs in air, were two 
of its pinnacles omitted; doubtless also the same 
criticism on its monotonous decoration of the alter- 
nate rose and portcullis, which we made in regard 
to the Chapel of Henry VII., is here applicable. But 
its great length, its noble proportions, its rare rich 
windows, its splendid organ-screen — old in Mil- 
ton's college days — must appeal to every lover of 
beauty. One loves to think of the young poet mus- 
ing here upon those well-known lines in " II 



6S /iDilton's England 

Penseroso " which this stately building may have 
inspired. 

" But let my due feet never fail 

To walk the studious cloisters pale, 

And love the high, embowered roof, 

With antick pillars massy proof, 

And storied windows, richly dight, 

Casting a dim religious light. 

There let the pealing organ blow, 

To the full voiced Quire below, 

In service high and anthem clear, 

As may with sweetness through mine ear 

Dissolve me into ecstasies, 

And bring all heaven before mine eyes." 

In King's Chapel Queen Elizabeth attended ser- 
vice several times, and listened with delight to a 
Latin sermon from the text " Let every soul be 
subject unto the higher powers." On the afternoon 
of the same Sunday she returned to the antechapel 
and witnessed a play of Plautus. 

Among many buildings which were very old even 
in Milton's time must be mentioned the church of 
St. Benedict on Bene't Street, which was once the 
chapel of Corpus Christi College. Its ancient tower 
is especially noteworthy. Its little double windows 
are separated by a baluster-shaped column. The 
tower is similar to one at Lincoln, and, with the 
whole structure, antedates the Norman conquest. 

A generation before Milton's time Robert Browne, 



flDilton's England 6 9 

the father of Congregationalism, drew great crowds 
within this venerable edifice to listen to his radical 
doctrine. At Cambridge, where he had studied, 
he became impressed with the perfunctoriness and 
worldliness of the Church of his time, and he re- 
solved to " satisfy his conscience without any regard 
to license or authority from a bishop." 

When the Pilgrim Fathers fled from Austerfield 
and Scrooby in 1608, it was as Brownists or Sepa- 
ratists that they went to Holland. They sought a 
refuge where they might worship God according to 
the dictates of their own conscience, without inter- 
ference of bishop or presbyter. It was Browne's 
doctrine, not only of the absolute separation of 
Church and state, but also of the independence of 
each individual congregation, that laid the founda- 
tion of church government in New England. Presby- 
terianism has gained little root east of the Hudson. 
After Browne had suffered for his faith in thirty of 
the dismal dungeons of that day, and, shattered in 
mind by his suffering, had recanted and returned to 
Mother Church, his disciples remained true to the 
light that he had shown them; the generation of 
scholars with whom Milton talked at Cambridge 
were as familiar with Browne's doctrine as the 
present generation is with that of Maurice and 
Martineau, and Milton must have been much influ- 
enced by it. 



7° /IIMlton's England 

Opposite St. John's Chapel is the little round 
church of the Holy Sepulchre. This is the earliest 
of the four churches in England built by the Tem- 
plars which still remain. It is similar to the Temple 
church in London, and was probably begun a little 
later than St. Benedict's, which has just been men- 
tioned. It is questionable whether the students of 
Milton's college days appreciated the beauty of this 
beautiful remnant of the Norman period that was 
in their midst. The taste of that day was decidedly 
for architecture of the Renaissance type, of which 
Cambridge boasts many examples. 

In Milton's time the most beautiful quadrangle 
in Cambridge, and perhaps in the world, that of 
Trinity, had been but newly finished by the architect. 
Ralph Symons, who altered and harmonised a group 
of older buildings. In the centre of the court is 
Neville's fountain, built in 1602, which is a fine 
example of good English Renaissance work. During 
four years of Milton's residence, part of St. John's 
College was in process of erection in the Italian 
Gothic style. This was at the expense of the Lord 
Keeper Williams, whose initials and the date. 1624, 
are lettered in white stone near the western oriel. 
It was completed in 1628. Clare Bridge was not 
finished until 1640, and most of the other beautiful 
bridges that span the Cam to-day were unknown 




ST. SEPULCHRE'S CHURCH, CAMBRIDGE 



ABUton's Englano 7 1 

to Milton when he mused beside its shady banks 
where 

" Camus, reverend sire, went footing slow, 
His mantle hairy and his bonnet sedge 
Inwrought with figures dim, and on the edge 
Like to that sanguine flower inscribed with woe." 

Only fifteen miles away, across the level fields, lay 
Ely Cathedral, built on what was once hardly more 
than an island in the Fens. Many a time during 
his seven years in the university town must Milton 
have walked over there, or ridden on one of Hobson's 
horses, perhaps with his dear Charles Diodati, to 
view the mighty structure, or to study its Norman 
interior. Its gray towers and octagonal lantern 
dominate the little town that clusters around it, and 
may be seen from far across the plain. 

During these studious years, while Milton walked 
among the colleges where Chaucer, Bacon, Ben 
Jonson, and Erasmus had likewise walked as stu- 
dents, he was not only busied with logic, philosophy, 
and the literature of half a dozen living and dead 
languages, but his tender emotions seem to have been 
briefly touched by some unknown fair one; and his 
interest in public matters, for instance, Sir John 
Eliot's imprisonment in the Tower, is evident. In 
one letter he mentions the execution of a child but 
nine years old, for setting fire to houses. A scourge 



72 rtMlton's £nalan& 

of the plague afflicted London on the year that he 
entered Cambridge, and five years later he was 
driven from town by its devastation there. The 
university ceased all exercises, and the few members 
of it that remained shut themselves in as close pris- 
oners. So great was the poverty and suffering inci- 
dent to this calamity, that the king appealed to the 
country for aid to the stricken town. 

During these years of quiet growth, Milton's first 
noteworthy poems appear, of which the Latin poems, 
according to good judges, deserve the preference. 
We here mention only some of his English poems. 
The longest of these, which was written the month 
and year when he came to his majority, was begun 
on Christmas morning, 1629. This serious youth of 
twenty-one longed to give " a birthday gift for 
Christ," and thus appeared his poem, " On the 
Morning of Christ's Nativity." Three or four years 
earlier he had written on the death of his baby niece, 
Mrs. Philips's child, his lines " On the Death of a 
Fair Infant." The revelation of self in his sonnet 
" On His Being Arrived to the Age of Twenty- 
Three," makes the latter the most interesting of 
these early flights of song. 

The most precious literary treasure which Cam- 
bridge possesses, and as Mr. Edmund Gosse asserts, 
" the most precious manuscript of English lit- 



flDUton's England 73 

erature in the world," is the packet of thirty loose 
and ragged folio leaves covered with Milton's hand- 
writing, which since 1691 has lain in Trinity Col- 
lege Library. For a generation, they attracted no 
attention, but later they were examined and handled 
by so many that they suffered seriously; within 
fifty years, seventeen lines of " Comus " were torn 
out and stolen by some unknown thief. Mr. Gosse, 
in a delightful article in the Atlantic Monthly, upon 
"The Milton Manuscripts at Cambridge," gives reins 
to his imagination in picturing the sudden tempta- 
tion of this man, who, passing down the long ranges 
of " storied urn and animated bust," which adorn the 
interior of Wren's famous structure, advances 
beyond the beautiful figure of the youthful Byron 
to the gorgeous window in which the form of Isaac 
Newton shines resplendent. The careless attendant 
places in his hands the richly bound thin folio, — 
" and now the devil is raging in the visitor's bosom ; 
the collector awakens in him, the bibliomaniac is 
unchained. In an instant the unpremeditated crime 
is committed. . . . And so he goes back to his own 
place certain that sooner or later his insane crime will 
be discovered . . . certain of silent infamy and 
unaccusing outlawry, with no consolation but that 
sickening fragment of torn verse which he can never 
show to a single friend, can never sell nor give nor 



74 flMlton'5 JEnolanfc 

bequeath. Among literary criminals, I know not 
another who so burdens the imagination as this 
wretched mutilator of ' Comus.' " These pages are 
the laboratory or studio of the poet, and reveal most 
interestingly the progress of his art during his earlier 
creative years. Like Beethoven's note-book, they 
teach the impatient and inaccurate that genius con- 
descends carefully to note little things and to take 
infinite pains, whether it be with symphonies or 
sonnets. Charles Lamb, on looking over the Milton 
manuscripts, whimsically recorded his astonishment 
that these lines had not fallen perfect and polished 
from the poet's pen. " How it staggered me to see 
the fine things in their ore ! interlined, corrected ! as 
if their words were mortal, alterable, displaceable at 
pleasure! " But the average man, who despairs of 
ever attaining artistic excellence, and finds every 
kind of literary composition a formidable task, takes 
consolation in the fact here revealed, that even the 
creator of " L' Allegro " and " II Penseroso," before 
he reached the perfect phrase, — " endless morn of 
light," — experimented with no less than six others : 
" ever-endless light," " ever glorious," " uneclipsed," 
" where day dwells without night," and " in cloud- 
less birth of night." The authorities of Trinity 
College, having of late realised the invaluable service 
to men of letters that this glimpse into the poet's 



/HMlton's Enolanfc 75 

workshop would be, have issued a limited edition, in 
sumptuous form, of a perfect facsimile of the 
Milton manuscripts. " Now, for the first time," as 
Mr. Gosse remarks, " we can examine in peace, and 
without a beating heart and blinded eyes, the price- 
less thing in its minutest features." When it is 
remembered that no line of Shakespeare's remains 
in his own handwriting, and nothing of any conse- 
quence of Chaucer's or Spenser's, Mr. Gosse cannot 
be accused of over-statement when he says that to 
all lovers of literature this volume is " a relic of 
inestimable ' value. To those who are practically 
interested in the art of verse, it reads a more preg- 
nant lesson than any other similar document in the 
world." 

Some day the great university may add to its 
charms not only an adequate memorial to its Puri- 
tans, but one to its poets — Spenser, Milton, Pope, 
Gray, Coleridge, Wordsworth, Byron, and Tenny- 
son, who have enriched it by their presence, and have 
made Cambridge par excellence the university of the 
poets. It must be remembered that Chaucer and 
Shakespeare were not university men. 

The time for a pilgrimage to Cambridge is term 
time, when window-boxes, gay with blossoms, 
brighten gray old walls within the " quads," and 
when the streets are enlivened by three thousand 



7*5 flMlton's Enalar^ 

favoured youths intent on outdoor sport. Then all 
points of interest are accessible, and perchance one 
may be so fortunate as to get entrance up narrow, 
worn stone stairways into some student's cosy study ; 
the visitor will find it lined with books, rackets, and 
boxing-gloves, and decorated with trophies and 
photographs of some one else's sister. Bits of college 
gossip and local slang, hints of college traditions, 
prejudices, and customs pleasantly vary the tourist's 
hours spent over the fine print of Baedeker and 
in search for the tombs of eminent founders. 

Even if one is a tourist and not a " fresher," he 
will find it profitable to study contemporary Cam- 
bridge through " The Fresher's Don't," written by 
" A Sympathiser, B. A.," and addressed to freshers 
" in all courtesy." As to dress, the " fresher." 
among other pieces of sage advice, is told : " Don't 
forget to cut the tassel of your cap just level with 
the board. Only graduates wear long tassels." 

" Don't wear knickerbockers with cap and gown, 
nor carry a stick or umbrella. These are stock 
eccentricities of Fresherdom." (The genuine Cam- 
bridge student would rather be soaked to his skin 
and risk pneumonia, than encounter the derisive 
grin which an umbrella would evoke.) 

" Don't aspire to seniority by smashing your cap 
or tearing your gown, as you deceive no one." 



flMlton's lenglanfc 77 

" Don't be a tuft-head. The style is more fa- 
voured by errand boys than gentlemen." 

" Don't by any chance sport a tall hat in Cam- 
bridge. It will come to grief." 

Under other headings, the following injunctions 
may be selected : 

" Don't sport during your first month. You will 
only earn the undesirable appellation of ' Smug.' " 

" Don't speak disrespectfully of a man ' Who only 
got a third in his Trip., and so can't be very good.' 
Before you go down your opinion will be ' That a 
man must be rather good to take the Trip, at all.' " 

" Don't mistake a Don for a Gyp. The Gyp 
is the smarter individual." 

" Don't forget that St. Peter's College is ' Pot- 
House,' Caius is ' Keys,' St. Catherine's is ' Cats,' 
Magdalene is ' Maudlen,' St. John's College Boat 
Club is ' Lady Margaret,' and a science man is 
taking ' Stinks.' " 

" Don't forget that Cambridge men ' keep ' and 
not ' live.' " 




CHAPTER IV. 

MILTON AT HORTON 

|N leaving Cambridge, when he was nearly 
twenty-four years old, Milton retired to 
his father's new home at Horton, about 
seventeen miles west of London. Here he tells us 
that, " with every advantage of leisure, I spent a 
complete holiday in turning over the Greek and Latin 
writers; not but that I sometimes exchanged the 
country for the town, either for the purpose of buy- 
ing books, or for that of learning something new in 
mathematics, or in music, in which sciences I then 
delighted." 

As Milton's father was in easy circumstances 
his son never earned money until after he was thirty- 
two years of age. These free and quiet years at 
Horton, when he was his own master, and was 
without a care, were the happiest of his life. 

The visitor from London now alights at the little 
station of Wraysbury, and if it be upon a July 
4th, as when the writer made a pilgrimage to 
Horton, he will find no pleasanter way to celebrate 
the day than to stroll through level fields by the 
78 



flDilton's Englano 79 

green country roadside a mile and a half to the little 
hamlet among the trees. On the way he will espy 
to the left, on the horizon, the gray towers of 
Windsor, and may imagine the handsome young 
poet, whose verse has glorified this quiet rural land- 
scape, pausing some morning in the autumn on his 
early walk to listen to the far sound of the hunts- 
man's horn, and presently to see the merry rout of 
gaily clad dames and cavaliers dash by, leaping 
fearlessly the hedgerows and barred gates. 

Horton is a tiny, tranquil village, with little that 
remains to-day, outside the ancient parish church, 
that John Milton saw, except the Horton manor- 
house of the Bulstrode family, which had had con- 
nections with Horton from the time of Edward VI. 
The modern Milton manor, situated in beautiful 
grounds, may or may not stand upon the site of 
Milton's former home, which remained until 1798, 
when it was pulled down. The old tavern of uncer- 
tain date upon the one broad street may perhaps 
have gathered around its antique hob, within the 
little taproom, gray-haired peasants who guided 
clumsy ploughs through the rich loam of the fields of 
Horton, while the white-handed poet sat on a velvet 
lawn under leafy boughs, and penned his blithe 
tribute to the nightingale, or in imagination sported 
with Amaryllis in the shade, or with the shepherds, 



So /HMlton's Englanfc 

sprites, and nymphs who peopled his youthful 
dreams. 

As in Cambridge, runnels of clear water, which 
come from the little river Colne not far distant, 
flow beside the road. Even to-day one has not far 
to seek to find the suggestion for those exquisite 
lines in " Comus " which Milton wrote in Horton : 

" By the rushy-fringed bank, 
Where grows the willow and the osier dank, 
My sliding chariot stays, 
Thick set with agate and the azurn sheen 
Of turkis blue and emerald green 
That in the channel strays : 
Whilst from off the waters fleet 
Thus I set my prindess feet 
O'er the cowslip's velvet head 
That bends not as I tread." 

The student of Milton finds the centre of interest 
in Horton to-day to be the beautiful old church 
where the Milton family attended service for five 
years, and where the mother lies buried. 

It stands in the green churchyard, back from the 
village street. Yew-trees and rose-bushes lend it 
shade and fragrance. The tombs for the most part 
are not moss-grown with age, but are rather new. 
though the slab at the entrance over which Milton 
passed is marked " 1612." The battlemented stone 
tower is draped with ivy and topped with reddish 






flMIton's Englanb 81 

brick. Like scores of churches of the twelfth or 
thirteenth century, in which it was built, the gabled 
portico is on the side. The interior is well-pre- 
served ; it has a nave with two aisles and a chancel, 
and in the porch is an old Norman arch. Upon 
the wall at the rear are wooden tablets which record 
curious bequests of small annuities for monthly 
doles of bread to needy people. 

Never since those five joyous years at Horton has 
any English poet blessed the world with verse of 
such rare loveliness and perfection as fell from the 
pen of Milton during this time, when spirit, heart, 
and mind were in attune. The world's clamour 
had not broken in upon his peace. 

Probably at the request of his friend, the com- 
poser Lawes, he wrote his " Arcades " in honour of 
the Countess Dowager of Derby, who had been 
Spenser's friend. The venerable lady lived about 
ten miles north of Horton on her fine old estate of 
Harefield, where Queen Elizabeth had visited her 
and her husband. On that occasion a masque of 
welcome had been performed for her in an avenue 
of elms, which thus received the name of the 
" Queen's Walk." It was in this verdant theatre 
that Milton's " Arcades " was performed by the 
young relatives of the countess. Among these were 
Lady Alice and her boy-brothers, who on the fol- 



32 /HMlton's England 

lowing year took part in Milton's " Comus," which 
he wrote anonymously to be played at Ludlow 
Castle upon the Welsh border, when the children's 
father was installed as lord president of Wales. 
Besides these longer poems, Milton wrote his " II 
Penseroso " and " L' Allegro " at Horton, as well 
as the noble elegy " Lycidas," which was written in 
memory of his gifted friend, Edward King, who 
was drowned in the summer of 1637, just before 
Milton left his father's home. 

In this peaceful valley of the Thames, his clear 
eye searched out every sight, his musical ear sought 
out every sound that revealed beauty or that sug- 
gested the antique, classic world in which his whole 
nature revelled. He walked in " twilight groves " 
of " pine or monumental oak ; " he listened to " soft 
Lydian airs " and curfew bells, to the lark's song - , 
and Philomel's. Pie watched " the nibbling flocks," 
the " labouring clouds." and saw, " bosomed high 
in tufted trees," towers and battlements arise, and 
beheld in vision his — 

" Sabrina fair, . . . 
Under the glassy, cool translucent wave 
In twisted braids of lilies knitting 
The loose train of her amber dropping hair." 

He lived in a world enchanted by the magic 
of his genius. Yet in his little world o\ loveliness 






flDilton's EnQlanfc 83 

he was not deaf to the distant hoarse cry of the 
coming storm, and at the last the Puritan within 
him awoke and cried out at those — 

"who little reckoning make 
Than how to scramble at the shearers' feast . . . 
Blind mouths ! that scarce themselves know how to hold 
A sheephook — or have learnt aught else the least 
That to the faithful herds-man's art belongs ! 
What recks it them ? What need they ? They are sped ; 
And when they list, their lean and flashy songs, 
Grate on their scrannel pipes of wretched straw ; 
The hungry sheep look up and are not fed 
But swoln with wind and the rank mist they draw 
Rot inwardly and foul contagion spread." 

In the spring of 1637, the last year that the poet 
spent at Horton, just before another outbreak of 
the plague, his mother died. We may think of 
brother Christopher, a young student of laws of the 
Inner Temple, and the widowed sister Anne and her 
two boys coming post-haste from London, and stand- 
ing beside the desolate father and the poet-brother 
in the chancel, when the tabernacle of clay was 
lowered to its resting-place. A plain blue stone 
now bears the record : " Heare lyeth the Body of 
Sarah Milton, the wife of John Milton, who died 
the 3rd of April, 1637." 

The American visitor to Horton on the day that 
commemorates his country's declaration of inde- 



84 /HMlton's JEnglanb 

pendence will remember Runnymede and Magna 
Charta Island. And he will find nothing more con- 
sonant with his feeling, after visiting the home of 
the republican Milton, than to wend his way across 
the fields, golden with waving grain and gay with 
scarlet poppies, to the spot where his ancestors and 
Milton's in 12 15 brought tyrant John to sullen 
submission to their just demands. 

On the margin of the river he may embark, and 
as the sun casts grateful shadows eastward, he ma}' 
drift gently down beside the long, narrow island in 
the rushy margin of the stream, where white swans 
build their nests. A notice warns him not to tres- 
pass, for the gray stone house upon it, whose gables 
are half hid by dense shrubbery, is private property. 
Some day perhaps this English nation that so loves 
its own great history will reclaim this historic spot, 
and mark Magna Charta Island with a memorial of 
the brave men who made it world-famous. Or 
perhaps, — who knows? — some American, who has 
spent three years at Oxford, and learned to love 
the history of the race from which he sprang, may 
be impelled to honour that which is best in her, and 
after placing in Cambridge and in Horton fit 
memorials of Milton, may be moved to erect here 
a worthy monument to the bold barons. 



— 




CHAPTER V. 

MILTON ON THE CONTINENT. IN ST. BRIDE'S 

CHURCHYARD. AT ALDERSGATE STREET. 

THE BARBICAN. HOLBORN. SPRING GARDENS 

|NE year after his mother's death, and 
probably just after Christopher's wedding, 
the poet, now a man of thirty, arrived in 
Paris, accompanied by his servant, and bearing 
valuable letters of introduction, among others, some 
from Sir Henry Wotton. As we are dealing with 
Milton's England, scant space must be allowed to 
this year or more spent among the savants and the 
unwonted sights of France and Italy. In Paris 
the young scholar was introduced by Lord Scuda- 
more to the man whom he most desired to see, — the 
great Hugo Grotius, a man of stupendous erudi- 
tion and lofty character. Milton declared that he 
venerated him more than any modern man, and 
well he might, for the Dutch hero and exile had 
not his equal upon the Continent, even in that age of 
great men. 

Passing through Provence, Milton entered Italy 
85 



86 /IDllton's JEntjlanD 

from Nice, and found himself in the land whose 
melodious language he had made his own, and 
whose history and literature few Italians of his age 
knew better than he. He went to Genoa, " La Su- 
perba," which then boasted of two hundred palaces; 
• thence to Leghorn, and fourteen miles farther to Pisa 
on the Arno, and, farther up the Arno, to beautiful 
Florence. Here he paused two months, lionised by 
the best society, and hobnobbing with painters, 
poets, prelates, and noblemen as he walked in Santa 
Croce, or on the heights of Fiesole, or in the leafy 
shade of Vallombrosa. Here it was that he was 
presented to the blind Galileo, " grown old," he 
writes, " a prisoner to the Inquisition for thinking 
in Astronomy otherwise than the Franciscan and 
Dominican licensers thought." Doubtless, in later 
years, when blindness and royal disfavour had 
embittered but failed to crush his spirit, the gray- 
haired poet often recalled this visit made in his 
radiant youth. 

Going by way of Siena, on its rocky height, Mil- 
ton passed on to Rome in the autumn, and here 
spent two months in the splendid city of the Popes, 
in which great St. Peter's was but newly finished. 
The city swarmed with priests and prelates, but the 
poet spoke freely of his own faith. One of his great 
joys was to listen to the incomparable singing of 



/IMlton's England 87 

Leonora Baroni, the Jenny Lind of his time, to 
whom he wrote exuberant panegyrics in Latin. 

In November, Milton drove to Naples, a hundred 
miles away, where he was favoured with the hospi- 
tality of the aged Manso, the friend of Tasso, and 
the wealthy patron of letters ; he showed the young 
Englishman his beloved city, presented him with 
valuable gifts, and welcomed him in his villa at 
Pozzuoli, overlooking the bay of Naples. 

Milton had planned to visit Sicily and Greece, 
but he writes : " The sad news of civil war coming 
from England called me back; for I considered it 
disgraceful that, while my fellow countrymen were 
righting at home for liberty, I should be travelling 
abroad at ease for intellectual purposes." 

War, however, had not yet broken out, and 
Milton lingered another two months in Rome, little 
aware of the relics of the Caesars that lay buried in 
the Forum under the cow-pasture of his time. 

Another visit to Florence, where he was again 
the centre of attraction, was followed by trips to the 
quaint mediaeval cities of Lucca, Ferrara, Bologna, 
and to Venice by the sea. Guido Reni, Guercino, 
Domenichino, and Salvator Rosa were then living, 
and he may have chanced upon them in his wander- 
ings. From Venice he turned back through Verona 
and Milan, and paused a little in Geneva, which was 



88 flDUton's England 

still under the strong influence of its great reformer, 
Calvin ; then he journeyed on to Paris, where a 
royal infant, Louis XIV., had been born during his 
travels. On reaching home, after this journey into 
the great splendid world full of temptations to every 
man who was dowered with keen susceptibilities 
and a passionate, vehement disposition, Milton 
writes : " I again take God to witness that in all 
those places where so many things are considered 
lawful, I lived sound and untouched from all prof- 
ligacy and vice, having this thought perpetually 
with me, that though I could escape the eyes of men, 
I certainly could not the eyes of God." 

It was a chaste and modest love that inspired the 
six amatory sonnets in Italian, which were probably 
written during his stay abroad. It was a refined 
and high-bred man, who knew the world and took 
it at its just measure, who was now to lend his hand 
to fight the people's battle. 

On his return to England Milton did not take 
up his residence again in his father's home at 
Horton, which was then kept by his younger brother 
and his wife. He went to London, and for a brief 
time made his home with a tailor named Russel 
in St. Bride's Churchyard, near Fleet Street, within 
view of Ludgate Hill and St. Paul's. Here in the 
winter of 1639-40 he began teaching the little Phil- 



flDtlton's Engla^ 8 9 

ips boys, his nephews, and took entire charge of 
his small namesake John, but eight years old. His 
sister Anne by this time had remarried, and was now 
Mrs. Agar. During his stay in St. Bride's Church- 
yard, Milton jotted down on seven pages of the 
manuscript that is now in Trinity College Library 
suggestions for future work with which his brain 
was teeming. Of the ninety-nine subjects that he 
considered, sixty-one, including " Paradise Lost " 
and " Samson," are Scriptural, and thirty-eight, 
including " Alfred and the Danes " and " Harold 
and the Normans," are on British subjects. Like 
the young Goethe who projected " Faust," which 
was not finished until his hair had whitened, Milton 
conceived his epic when it was to wait a quarter of 
a century for completion. 

Says Edward Philips, the elder nephew whom he 
taught : " He made no long stay in his lodgings on 
St. Bride's Churchyard : necessity of having a place 
to dispose his books in, and other goods fit for the 
furnishing of a good handsome house, hastening 
him to take one ; and accordingly, a pretty garden- 
house he took in Aldersgate Street, at the end of 
an entry, and therefore the fitter for his turn, 
besides that there are few streets in London more 
free from noise than that." 

At that time the entrance to the street from St. 



9° /IDilton's England 

Martin's-le-Grand was one of the seven gates of 
the city wall. A new one, on the site of a far older 
one, had been erected when Milton was nine years 
old; this had "two square towers of four stories 
at the sides, pierced with narrow portals for the foot 
passengers and connected by a curtain of masonry 
of the same height across the street, having the main 
archway in the middle." Besides the figures of 
Samuel and Jeremiah, the gate was adorned with 
an equestrian statue of James I. on the Aldersgate 
side, and the same monarch on his throne on the St. 
Martin's-le-Grand side. In 1657 Howell says: 
" This street resembleth an Italian street more than 
any other in London, by reason of the spaciousness 
and uniformity of the buildings and straightness 
thereof, with the convenient distance of the houses/' 
Amid the labyrinth of dingy, crowded alleys with 
which the garden spaces of the seventeenth century 
now are covered, one looks in vain to-day for any 
trace of Milton's home; in short, of all the houses 
that he occupied in London, no one remains, or even 
has its site marked. All we know of the house 
on Aldersgate Street is, that it stood in the 
second precinct of St. Botolph's parish, between the 
gate and Maidenhead Court on the right, and Little 
Britain and Westmoreland Alley on the left. 
Near by dwelt his old teacher. Doctor Gill, and 



flDilton's Englanfc 9* 

Doctor Diodati, the father of his dearest friend, 
whose recent death he mourned in a touching elegy 
written in Latin. Upon his walks into the open 
fields, which were not then far distant, he must have 
passed many fine town houses of the gentry, their 
sites now covered by a dreary waste of shops and 
factories. During these years we learn that he 
varied his studies in the classics, and his keen ob- 
servations on the doings of the newly assembled 
Long Parliament by an occasional " gaudy-day," 
in company with some " young sparks of his ac- 
quaintance/ ' 

It was in Aldersgate Street that Milton began 
writing his vehement pamphlets, and it was Thomas 
Underhill, at the sign of the " Bible " in Wood 
Street, Cheapside, who published the first polemics 
which he and young Sir Harry Vane sent forth 
upon the burning questions of the day, into which 
the scope of this volume forbids us to enter. Mil- 
ton's future career was a complete refutation of 
Wordsworth's conception of him as a lonely star 
that dwelt apart. The gentle author of " Comus " 
and the composer of elegant sonnets had changed 
his quill for that " two-handed engine " which was 
to smite prelate and prince. 

During these days the post brought daily news 
of the horrors of the insurrection in Ireland ; Milton 



92 /HMlton's Enolanfc 

read " of two and twenty Protestants put into a 
thatched house and burnt alive " in the parish of 
Kilmore; of naked men and pregnant women 
drowned; of "eighteen Scotch infants hanged on 
clothiers' tenterhooks;" of an Englishman, wife, and 
five children hanged, and buried when half alive; 
of eighty forced to go on the ice " till they brake the 
ice and were drowned." These, and the hideous 
tortures upon thousands, which history relates, may 
explain, if they do not palliate the cruelties a few 
years later which Cromwell committed, and which 
have made his name synonymous with " monster " 
to this day throughout this much tormented and 
turbulent Irish people. 

Americans who sharply condemn the devastation 
which old Oliver wrought will also do well to cry 
out no less loudly at the like barbaric slaughter in 
the island of Samar, which was ordered two hun- 
dred and fifty years later by some of their own 
officers. 

War opened. There were doubtless anxious days 
in the house on Aldersgate Street, for brother 
Christopher, who stood with the royal party, had 
moved with his father from Horton to Reading, 
which was besieged. But war was not the sole 
cause for anxiety. When old Mr. Milton arrived 
safely in London late in the summer he found hi 






flMlton'6 England 93 

son John married and already parted from his bride 
of seventeen, who had lived with him but one short 
month. Of the brief courting of Mary Powell at 
her father's house at Forest Hill, near Oxford, we 
know little. But one day in May, when King 
Charles I. had driven her brothers and all other 
students out of Christ Church, and had taken up 
temporary residence there himself, the venturesome 
lover came into the enemy's country and called on 
her. The family was well known to him; their 
comfortable mansion housed ten or eleven children 
and had fourteen rooms. We read of their " stilling- 
house," "cheese-press house," "wool-house," of their 
two coaches, one wain, and four carts. It was a 
merry household, and one well-to-do in worldly 
goods. 

Whether the girl was deeply enamoured of the 
grave, handsome man, twice her age, who asked her 
hand, is doubtful, but they were soon married, and 
in the Aldersgate house, the nephew relates, there 
was " feasting held for some days in celebration of 
the nuptials, and for entertainment of the bride's 
friends." Then the relatives bade the bride good- 
bye. But the young wife, having been brought up 
and lived " where there was a great deal of company 
and merriment, dancing, etc., when she came to 
live with her husband found it very solitary ; no 



94 /IDtlton's Enolanfc 

company came to her;" consequently at the end 
of a month her preoccupied husband gave consent 
to the girl's request to pay a visit home, with the 
promise of returning in September. 

Some sons of intimate friends joined the nephews 
as pupils, and the elder Milton was added to the 
household. But the bride declined to answer her 
husband's letters or to return ; during the following 
months the irate man, thus deserted, wrote his 
pamphlets on " Divorce," while all England was 
astir with the meeting of the famous Westminster 
Assembly, the spread of Independency, and the 
king's defeat at Marston Moor. During these days 
also Milton wrote his remarkable scheme for the 
education of gentlemen's sons, in which he showed 
himself as radical and original and as ready to 
make learning a delightful and not an odious pro- 
cess as did Rousseau and Froebel a century or more 
later. Marvellous was the work accomplished by 
Milton's young pupils at Aldersgate Street. We 
read of these boys of fourteen and sixteen, 
though even their learned teacher knew not yet 
of the microscope and the law of gravitation, study- 
ing not only Greek and Latin, but Hebrew, Chaldee, 
Syriac, and Italian. 

Milton's noble " Areopagitica " — a plea for free- 
dom of the press — was written during these melan- 



AMlton's England 95 

choly, wifeless months, while the din of civil war 
was in the air, and he mused in wrath and bitterness 
over his country's miseries and his own. 

The fortunes of the Powell family had waned 
with the king's cause. One day, when Milton called 
on a relative who lived near by his home, on the 
site of the present post-office, " he was surprised," 
writes his nephew, " to see one whom he thought 
to have never seen more, making submission and 
begging pardon on her knees before him." A 
reconciliation was effected, and, with the wife of 
nineteen now two years older and wiser than since 
their first attempt at matrimony, they began house- 
keeping in the Barbican. 

This was a larger house than the one in Alders- 
gate Street, and only a three minutes' walk from 
it. It remained until Masson's lifetime and had, 
he says, " the appearance of having been a commo- 
dious enough house in the old fashion." " And I 
have been informed," he adds, " that some of the old 
windows, consisting of thick bits of glass lozenged 
in lead, still remained in it at the back, and that 
the occupants knew one of the rooms in it as a 
schoolroom, where Milton had used to teach his 
pupils." The visitor to the noisy, bustling Barbi- 
can to-day, close to old London wall, will find noth- 
ing that Milton saw. 



96 flMlton's England 

Here he published the first edition of his col- 
lected poems. The title-page tells us that the songs 
were set to music by the same musician, Henry 
Lawes, " Gentleman of the King's Chapell," who 
had engaged him to write the " Arcades " and 
" Comus." It was to be " sold at the signe of the 
Princes Arms in Paul's Churchyard, 1645." The 
wretched botch of an engraving of the poet which 
accompanied it displeased him, and he humourously 
compelled the unsuspecting and unlearned artist to 
engrave in Greek beneath it the following lines : 

" That an unskilful hand had carved this print 
You'd say at once, seeing the living face ; 
But finding here no jot of me, my friends, 
Laugh at the botching-artist's mis-attempt." 

Unfortunately this was the only published por- 
trait of Milton during his life, and gave strangers 
at home and abroad the impression that his face 
was as grim as his pamphlets were caustic. 

By strange coincidence this house, where Wilton 
lived when " Comus " was first published, was but 
a few yards distant from the town house of the 
earl in whose honour the masque had been com- 
posed a dozen years or more before this. With him 
was the " Lady Alice." now nearly twenty-four 
years old, who, as a girl of eleven, had sung Mil- 



/IDilton's Englanfc 97 

ton's songs in Ludlow Castle. The earl loved music, 
and his children's music teacher, Lawes, and others 
who had acted in the merry masque comforted his 
invalidism with concourse of sweet sounds, almost 
within hearing of the old scrivener and organist 
and his poet-son. Milton loved Dawes, and wrote 
a sonnet to him; doubtless during these days they 
were much together. 

About the time that Milton's first baby daughter 
appeared, the Barbican house was crowded with 
the disconsolate Powell family, who had nearly lost 
their all, and fled to Mary's husband for protection. 
Mother Powell seems to have been a woman of 
strong personality, and the new baby was christened 
" Anne " for her. Within two months, both the 
Milton and Powell grandfathers were buried from 
the house in Barbican. In the burials at St. Giles's 
Cripplegate appears, in March, 1646, the record: 
"John Milton, Gentleman, 15." 

While worrying over the settlement of the Powell 
estates and brother Christopher's as well, Milton 
continued his teaching ; his pupil writes : " His 
manner of teaching never savoured in the least any- 
thing of pedantry." Cyriack Skinner, grandson of 
the great Coke, to whom he wrote two sonnets in 
later years, was his pupil in the Barbican. 

In 1647, J ust after the march of Fairfax and 



98 flDilton's England 

Cromwell through the city, Milton removed to a 
smaller house in High Holborn, " among those that 
open backward into Lincoln's Inn Fields," which 
had been laid out by Inigo Jones. Here he ceased 
playing the schoolmaster, became definitely a republi- 
can at heart, and busied himself with the writing of a 
history of England, and compiling of a Latin diction- 
ary and a System of Divinity. The new home was 
among pleasant gardens, and near the bowling green 
and lounging-place for lawyers and citizens. Its 
exact site is unknown. In 1648 a second baby girl, 
called Mary, was born to the Miltons in the new 
home. 

By his bold tractate on the " Tenure of Kings 
and Magistrates," which was written during the 
terrible days of the king's trial and execution, Mil- 
ton put himself on the side of the regicides. Exactly 
a month after its appearance he was waited on at 
High Holborn by a committee from the Council of 
State, who asked him to accept the position of 
" Secretary for Foreign Tongues." Flis eyesight 
was already failing; he could no longer read by 
candle-light ; but here was a great opportunity for 
public service, and he did not long hesitate. On 
March 20th, when he entered upon office, he learned 
that all letters to foreign states and princes were to 
be put into dignified Latin form, so as to be instantly 



/HMlton's England 99 

read by government officials in all countries, and not 
into the " wheedling, lisping jargon of the cringing 
French," as his nephew calls it. His salary was a 
trifle over £288 — worth about five times that sum 
to-day. Sometimes an early breakfast at High Hol- 
born was necessary in order to meet the council at 
seven a.m. in Whitehall, but usually it met at eight 
or nine. It seemed, however, best for the Miltons 
to move nearer Whitehall, and while he waited for 
his apartments to be ready, Milton took lodging at 
Charing Cross, opening into Spring Garden, where 
now is the meeting-place of the London County 
Council. This was on the royal estate, and was so 
named from a concealed fountain which spurted 
forth when touched by the unwary foot. It must 
have been a pleasant spot, with its bathing pond and 
bowling green and pheasant yard, which led from 
what is now Trafalgar Square into St. James's 
Park. Opposite, at Charing Cross, was the palace 
of the Percys, later called Northumberland 
House," and next to it, where now stands the Grand 
Hotel, was the home of Sir Harry Vane. Queen 
Eleanor's Cross had been taken down in 1647, an d 
the statue of Charles I., which on the year of Mil- 
ton's death replaced it on its site, was at this time 
kept in careful concealment. 

St. Martin's Lane was a genuine shady lane, bor- 



ioo /IDilton's England 

dered with hedges. The church which Milton saw 
upon the site of the present one was erected by 
Henry VIII., and was even then in reality St. 
Martin's in the Fields. 

Upon the north side of what is now Trafalgar 
Square, which is occupied by the National Gallery, 
stood the Royal Stables. Pall Mall, which leads 
westward, was so named from the Italian outdoor 
game, resembling croquet, which was played upon 
a green in the vicinity. It was then a resort for 
travellers and foreigners, who, like the Londoners 
Pepys and Defoe, frequented the chocolate and 
coffee houses in the neighbourhood and for a shil- 
ling an hour were carried about in sedan-chairs. 
The latter tells us that " the chairmen serve you for 
porters to run on errands, as your gondoliers do at 
Venice." 

St. James's Palace, with its picturesque brick 
gateway, had but just seen the last hours of the 
monarch whom Milton had helped dethrone. Here 
Charles II. had been born in 1630, and here the 
Princess Mary was born in 1662, and was married 
to William, Prince of Orange, fifteen vears later. 




CHAPTER VI. 

MILTON AT WHITEHALL. — SCOTLAND YARD. 

PETTY FRANCE. BARTHOLOMEW CLOSE. 

HIGH HOLBORN. JEWIN STREET. ARTIL- 
LERY WALK 

jILTON remained in Spring Gardens about 
seven months, when his new apartments in 
the north end of Whitehall Palace were 
ready. These opened from Scotland Yard, in which 
was the Guard House. The yeomen of the guard 
wore red cloth roses on back and breast, and must 
have seemed very gay and imposing personages to 
the 'little girls of the Milton family. Their rooms 
were connected with the various courts and suites of 
apartments that extended down to the Privy Garden. 
The palace in Cromwell's time probably retained in 
residence a large portion of the small army of 
caterers, butchers, brewers, confectioners, glaziers, 
etc., who provided for the constant needs of the 
huge establishment. The Horse Guards, built for 
gentlemen pensioners, was erected in 1641, and was 



io2 jflDilton's Enolanfc 

still quite new. This apparently was not on the site 
of the present Horse Guards, which was built in 

!753- 

At Scotland Yard, Milton's only son, John, was 
born, and here his protracted labours in his vehe- 
ment controversy with Salmasius brought on the 
blackness of great darkness which, at the age of 
forty-three, for ever shut his world from view. 
For the next twenty years and more it is the 
blind poet whose life we follow, during the period 
when his fiery spirit was chastened not only by his 
own afflictions, but by the nation's also. 

In 1652 Milton moved to Petty France, now York 
Street, near the Bird Cage Walk, which was so 
named from the king's aviary there. Here the 
next year his little daughter Deborah was born, and 
soon after his wife, at the age of twenty-six. after 
nine years of married life, died. After the first 
estrangement and reconciliation, so far as we know, 
all had gone well. Her little John, who had scarcely 
learned to speak his father's name, soon followed 
her to the grave. 

The household then consisted of the poet, his 
nephew and amanuensis John, and his three mother- 
less little girls. Masson describes the house as he 
saw it before its destruction in 1875. It was then 
No. 19 York Street, and had a squalid shop in its 




REAR OF MILTON'S HOUSE, AND TREE PLANTED BY HIM, 

YORK STREET, WESTMINSTER (PETTY FRANCE) 

From a?i old engraving . 



iHMlton's England 103 

lower part, and a recess on one side of it used for 
stacking wood. On entering by a small door and 
passage at the side of the shop, one groped up a 
dark staircase, where several tenants lived, in the 
rooms that were once all Milton's. " The larger 
ones on the first floor are not so bad, and what 
are now the back rooms of the house may have been 
even pleasant and elegant when the house had a 
garden of its own behind it, and that garden opened 
directly into the park." 

Jeremy Bentham, who over a century later was 
landlord of the house and lived close by, placed a 
tablet on the rear wall inscribed " Sacred to Milton, 
Prince of Poets." After 181 1 Bentham's tenant 
was William Hazlitt; before that his friend James 
Mill occupied the house. 

Lord Scudamore, who had given Milton an 
introduction to Grotius, was his next-door neigh- 
bour at York Street. To-day the loftiest apartment 
house in London stands upon the unmarked site 
of Milton's house. The frequent walk which Milton 
took to Whitehall, with a guide to his dark steps, 
during his eight years' residence here, led him half 
a mile across St. James's Park from Queen Anne 
Gate to Spring Gardens or the Plorse Guards. The 
ornamental water was not then there, but there were 
ponds and trees and pleasant stretches of green turf. 



io4 /IDilton's JEnfllanfc 

Charles II. had it later all laid out by the famous 
French landscape artist, Le Notre. 

Occasional sonnets — those to Cromwell, Vane, 
" On his Blindness," and " On the Late Massacre 
in Piedmont " — appeared in the increasing leisure 
of this period, when his duties lessened, and he 
retired on a diminished salary. But Milton was 
become a man who was sought out by foreigners 
of note and persons of quality ; among his friends, 
Andrew Marvell, the poet, and his pupil, Cyriack 
Skinner, were frequent visitors, with charming 
Lady Ranelagh, his neighbour, who persuaded him 
to teach her little son, and who he said had been 
to him in the place of kith and kin. 

After four years of widowerhood, when his little 
girls were sadly in need of a mother, Milton mar- 
ried Katharine Woodcock, daughter of a Captain 
Woodcock of Hackney, in the church of St. Mary 
Aldermanbury, on November 12, 1656. Her com- 
ing into the home in Petty France brought serenity 
and happiness to all its inmates. During the brief 
fifteen months of their married life, a little daughter 
came, who followed her soon after to her grave in 
St. Margaret's Church beside the Abbey, and the 
sorrowing husband was again left in his blindness 
to bring up his three motherless little daughters. 

After eighteen years, the poem, sketched out in 



flMlton's EnQlanfc 105 

St. Bride's Churchyard, was resumed, and in the 
lonely house in Petty France, the first lines of 
" Paradise Lost " were dictated, just before the clos- 
ing days of Cromwell's life. Under Richard Crom- 
well, Milton retained his secretaryship, but with the 
return of Charles II., in May, 1660, he fled his home 
in Petty France, for he well knew the vengeance 
that might follow. His little girls were sent no 
one knows whither, and he took refuge in a friend's 
house in Bartholomew Close, a passage which led 
from West Smithfield, through an ancient arch. It 
was filled with quaint old tenements, where Doctor 
Caius, the founder of Caius College, Cambridge, 
had lived, and also Le Sceur, who had modelled the 
statue- of Charles I., which, as has been stated, 
was concealed during the Commonwealth, and was 
soon to be erected. Sixty-five years later, young 
Benjamin Franklin set up type in a printing-office 
here. To the blind refugee, it mattered little that 
he had left his garden to be hemmed in by narrow 
walls. The labyrinth of little courts and tortuous 
passages was his safeguard. During those days of 
arrests and executions of his friends, Milton must 
have known that any day might bring the hang- 
man's summons for him. Many a time during the 
nearly four months that he was hidden here must 
he in imagination have heard the shouts of the fickle 



io6 flDilton's England 

populace, and seen himself haled in a cart to 
Tyburn gallows. Says Masson : " Absolutely no 
man could less expect to be pardoned at the Restora- 
tion than Milton," and " there is no greater histor- 
ical puzzle than this complete escape." But his 
faithful friend, Andrew Marvell, pleaded for him, 
and other powerful friends did their utmost in his 
behalf; the brain that was to give birth to a great 
epic was spared to England. 

Though Milton lay in some prison for a little 
time, during which his " infamous " books " were 
solemnly burnt at the Session house in the Old 
Bailey by the hand of the common hangman," he 
was soon a free man, though many of his com- 
panions were meanwhile hanged and quartered, or 
like Goffe and Whalley fled beyond seas and even 
there scarcely escaped the king's swift avengers. 

In December, Milton emerged from prison and 
moved temporarily into a little house on the north 
side of Holborn near Red Lion Square, which was 
behind it, and nearer Bloomsbury than was his 
former residence upon the street. Close by was the 
Red Lion Inn, where in January, on the anniversary 
of the execution of Charles I., lay on a hurdle, 
amidst a howling mob, the ghastly bodies of Crom- 
well, Ireton, and Bradshaw, which had been dis- 
interred and were on their wav to Tyburn to be 



fllMlton's England 107 

swung upon the gallows. It was well for Milton 
to sit behind barred doors in silence in those days, 
while Sir Harry Vane languished in prison, bold 
Algernon Sidney was in exile, and the England that 
he loved seemed in eclipse. 

In 1 66 1, Milton, who had good reason to reside 
as far away from Petty France and the court end 
of town as possible, returned to the neighbourhood 
of his early married life, and took a house in Jewin 
Street, off Aldersgate, at the end of the street near- 
est St. Giles's, Cripplegate, where his father lay 
buried. For the remainder of his life, here and in 
Artillery Walk, he was a parishioner of this church. 
During the three years spent here, Vane was be- 
headed, two thousand clergy were ejected from their 
livings, and many, as Richard Baxter tells us, 
starved on an income of only eight or ten pounds 
a year for a whole family; men of Milton's way 
of thinking struggled for daily bread on six days 
in the week, and preached on the seventh with the 
police upon their track. 

During these fruitful years in Jewin Street, while 
" Paradise Lost " was growing apace, Milton had 
about him his motherless and ill-educated girls. The 
oldest, about seventeen years of age, was hand- 
some, but lame, and had a defect of speech. It 
fell to Mary and little eleven-year-old Deborah to 



io8 /HMlton's England 

read, with scanty comprehension of the words, as 
their father required their services, from his Latin, 
Greek, Hebrew, French, Spanish, and Italian works. 
To them, and to a group of young men who felt 
it an honour to serve him, he dictated the sonorous 
lines of his great epic. No wonder that girls of a 
dozen or sixteen years of age found life in Jewin 
Street dull, and Greek dictionaries and the daily 
records of the doings of the hosts of heaven and 
hell abominably irksome. They served their father 
with grudging pen, and pilfered from him, and 
tricked him in his helpless sightlessness — small 
blame to them, perhaps, whose rearing had been 
by servants and governesses, but pitiable for the 
father of fifty years, who fought his daily battles 
with fate alone in the dark. 

Andrew r Marvell and Cyriack Skinner sought him 
out, and doubtless told him the latest literary news 
of Henry More, the Platonist; of Howell, but just 
appointed historiographer royal ; of Samuel Butler, 
who had just gone with the Lady Alice of " Comus " 
to Ludlow Castle ; of Richard Baxter, whose popu- 
lar book, " The Saints' Everlasting Rest," Milton 
had doubtless read when it appeared five years 
before; of Pepys, now secretary to the Admiralty; 
of Izaak Walton, whose "Complete Angler" Mil- 
ton may have read ten years before; of Evelyn and 



flDtlton's Englanfc io 9 

of the poet Cowley ; of Bishop Jeremy Taylor ; of 
George Fox, the valiant Quaker, and the philoso- 
phers, Hobbes, and John Locke, who was then at 
Oxford ; and the budding poet, John Dryden. 

We learn from Richardson that Milton usually 
dictated " leaning backward obliquely in an easy 
chair, with his leg flung over the elbow of it, 
though often when lying in bed in a morning." 
Sometimes he would lie awake all night without 
composing a line, when a flow of verse would come 
with such an impetus that he would call Mary and 
dictate forty lines at once. During these days a 
newly converted young Quaker, Thomas Ellwood, 
who was desirous of improving his Latin, and to 
see John Milton, who, he writes, " was a gentleman 
of great note for learning throughout the learned 
world," betook himself to the modest home on 
Jewin Street, got lodging hard by, and engaged 
to read Latin to him six afternoons a week. Milton, 
noticing that he used the English pronunciation, 
told him that if he wanted to speak with foreigners 
in Latin he must learn the foreign pronunciation. 
This Ellwood by hard labour accomplished, when 
Milton, seeing his earnestness, helped him greatly 
in translation. These happy hours were interrupted 
by Ellwood's arrest for attending the Quaker meet- 
ing in Aldersgate Street. Three months were spent 



no /HMltcn's jenolaiifc 

in Bridewell and Newgate, where he saw the bloody 
quarters and boiled heads of executed men, and 
wrote out in detail an account of the hideous spec- 
tacle. One heavenly day in a quiet library reading 
of Dido and iEneas with Milton, the next in an 
English hell of bestiality, filth, and cruelty — a 
memorable experience for a young man of twenty- 
two, was it not? 

Household affairs were going from bad to worse 
in Jewin Street, and the unhappy home needed a 
wife and mother. When the news came to the 
daughter Mary that her father was to marry again, 
she exclaimed that it was " no news to hear of his 
wedding, but if she could hear of his death, that 
would be something." The third wife, Elizabeth 
Minshull, was twenty-four years old when Milton 
married her, in the church of St. Mary Aldermary, 
a little south of his boyhood's home near Cannon 
Street. She proved an excellent wife, and was of a 
" peaceful and agreeable humour." There are tra- 
ditions that the young stepmother had golden hair 
and could sing; her good sense and housewifely 
accomplishments brought peace, comfort, and thrift 
into the discordant household. 

Soon after his marriage, the Milton family re- 
moved to a house in Artillery Walk, leading to 
Bunhill Fields. This was on the roadway which is 






/HMlton's England m 

the southern part of Bunhill Row. Not only was 
there a garden here, but the site of the present 
Bunhill Fields Cemetery, where Defoe, Bunyan, 
Richard Cromwell, and Isaac Watts lie buried, was 
then an open field; while, close at hand, was Artil- 
lery Ground, where trained bands occasionally 
paraded, as they have done from 1537 to the present 
time. Of the house we know little, except that it 
had four fireplaces. Near by was " Grub " Street, 
since changed to " Milton " Street, partly perhaps 
to commemorate the fact of the poet's residence 
in the neighbourhood. In June, 1665, while the 
Great Plague had begun its desolating course, 
Milton had completed the last lines of " Paradise 
Lost." It was then that young Ell wood came to his 
assistance, and engaged for him " a pretty box in 
Giles-Chalfont," whither he was driven with his 
wife and daughters. 




CHAPTER VII. 

CHALFONT ST. GILES. — ARTILLERY WALK 

j[F the pilgrim to the shrines of Puritans 
and poets has thought worth while to 
spend an afternoon at Horton, he may 
well spare two or three days more for a drive 
from there to Stoke Pogis, Harefield, and the region 
thirteen miles north of Horton in lovely Bucking- 
hamshire, among the Chiltern hills. 

Here stands, about twenty-three miles northwest 
of London, in the little village of Chalfont St. Giles, 
the only house that still exists in which Milton ever 
lived. The village lies in a quiet hollow among the 
hills, three or four miles removed from the shriek 
of any locomotive. One may approach it by train 
from the little stations of Chorley Wood or Chalfont 
Road. It will well repay one before doing so to 
make a detour of a mile and a half to Chenies, — 
one of the loveliest villages in all England, — beside 
the tiny Chess, where Matthew Arnold loved to 
angle. A delightful hostelry is the " Bedford 
Arms," where he always " put up." The chief 



flDtlton's Enalanfc 113 

feature of the place is the mortuary chapel of the 
Russells, where the family have been buried from 
1556 until the present da)'. But the lover of the 
picturesque will more admire the adjoining Tudor 
mansion. American multi-millionaires have built 
no Newport palace that is so attractive to the lover 
of the beautiful. 

As one drives toward Chalfont, he enters it at 
the end farthest from Milton's cottage, which is 
one of the last houses upon the left of the main 
street. It is on the road that leads to Beaconsfield, 
four miles away. The cottage lies at the foot of 
a slope close by the roadside; it is built of brick 
and timber, and has two entrances, four sitting- 
rooms, and five bedrooms. 

On the floor which is level with the garden are 
two sitting-rooms that look toward the hill slope 
and Beaconsfield. Their quaint old windows are 
rilled with diamond panes, which are set in lead 
and open outward. The long carved dining-table, 
in the room at the left, and the small table, cabinet, 
and stools in the room at the right, which is seen 
in the illustration, were Milton's own. Here at the 
open casement, during those days of horror in the 
stricken city, Milton sat and breathed the fragrant 
air, and in the evening listened to the nightingales 
which haunt the Chalfont groves. Hither the brave 



H4 flDUton'8 EnGlanfc 

young Elhvood came to greet him, fresh as he was 
from another imprisonment; he returned with his 
comments the manuscript of " Paradise Lost." 
which Milton had loaned to him, and added : " Thou 
hast said much here of Paradise lost, but what hast 
thou to say of Paradise found?" To which the 
poet answered nothing at the time, but, as the result 
proved, the query brought later a fitting response 
in " Paradise Regained." Perhaps the visitor may 
be allowed to ascend the narrow winding stair with 
its carved railing to the humble chambers under the 
gables, whither the poet groped his way to bed. and 
to glance into narrow cupboards, where he may have 
piled his books and manuscripts. There is a 
tender, pathetic charm about the place, which even 
the greater poet's house at Stratford lacks. The 
man Shakespeare — the successful dramatist — we 
know little of; his inner life we only guess at and 
infer. His consummate genius wins our worship ; 
it does not touch our hearts. But the blind poet, 
the passionate lover of liberty and fearless pleader 
for justice, the man who like blind Samson shook 
his locks in defiance of fate, and would not be cast 
down, this man we know. We have followed step 
by step his brilliant youth, his strenuous manhood. 
and his brave, declining years. Willi all his faults 
of temper we love him as we love Dante and Michael 



flMlton's Englanfc 115 

Angelo and Beethoven. We linger reverently in 
the little house made dear to England by his pres- 
ence there. 

Then we wander back a little on our way, to a 
row of antique houses and go through a passage to 
the venerable parish church and churchyard where 
Milton's feet doubtless have trod. 

En route to Beaconsfield the traveller will not 
fail to pause at Jordan's, a plain, square structure in 
a leafy grove, beside a green God's Acre. It was 
the Quaker meeting-house in Milton's day as it is 
still. At the rear is a concealed gallery where the 
worshippers took refuge when their service was 
broken up by armed pursuers. Close by are many 
unmarked graves, and among them is Ellwood's. 
But the grave of William Penn, the founder of a 
great American State, and the graves of his wife 
and children, have low modern headstones, for their 
position was well known. Here the man of gentle 
birth, the hero and saint, who is dear to all Ameri- 
cans, sleeps peacefully among his English kindred. 
During the year when Milton was at Chalfont, Penn 
was a youth in Paris, seeing the world, but keeping 
himself unspotted from it. 

At Beaconsfield we drive through a broad country 
road to the Saracen's Head — a conspicuous land- 
mark. We turn our steps at once to the gray old 



n6 flDtlton's £nglan& 

church and its battlemented tower, whose walls 
of flint rise in rugged strength from the churchyard 
with its mossy tombs. Within the centre aisle lies 
buried the valiant apostle of American freedom — 
Edmund Burke. 

He was a man with whom the refugee at Chalfont 
would have found much in common had he lived a 
century and a quarter later. The inscription over his 
grave is modern, and so are the bas-relief and 
inscription to him on the side wall. His former 
seat within the parish church is marked upon the 
floor, and a fine carved desk is made from his old 
pew. Within the churchyard gay roses and solemn 
yews droop over ancient monuments, among them, 
the showy obelisk on Waller's grave. Nothing is 
lovelier than the drive late in an afternoon over the 
high hills, from which one catches far distant views, 
to Amersham, which lies in a little valley among the 
hills. This was a seat of the Puritan revolt and 
earlier martyrdoms. John Knox preached here — 
an obnoxious personage to the worthy sexton of the 
beautiful church, who told the writer that he had 
buried every man and woman in the parish for forty 
years. "The fact is." quoth this worthy, "John 
Knox traduced Mary Queen of Scots; now I've no 
use for a man who isn't good to the ladies." On 
being reminded that Elizabeth did worse and cut 



/Button's England 117 

her head off, he condoned that as being " probably 
an affair of state." A lover of poets was this sexton. 
" I've read 'em all," he said, " but my favourite is 
Pope." Isaac Watts likewise shared his approval, 
and he volunteered upon the spot a number of his 
hymns from memory. " But I take a lugubrious 
view of life," continued this digger of many graves, 
" for it's just grub, grub, grub, all your life, and 
then be shovelled under ; the fact is, as any man can 
see with half an eye, that this is the age of mammon 
and no mistake." Shakespeare would have found a 
gravedigger to his mind in the sexton of Amersham. 
Amersham does not offer so favourable accommo- 
dations for the night as does Wendover. which has 
a choice of hostelries, and is but a few minutes' ride 
by train from the Amersham station, a quarter of 
a mile away. After viewing the early English 
church in Wendover next morning, one may hire a 
trap and drive to Great Hampden, three miles dis- 
tant, to the stately home of John Hampden, within 
a large park. There are still traces of the ancient 
road which was cut through the park for Queen 
Elizabeth. The shady avenue of beeches around the 
side leads up to the little church of gray flint stone 
which stands near the great mansion and its mighty 
cedars of Lebanon. The little churchyard is carpeted 
with velvet turf, starred with tiny white flowers 



us /HM Item's JEmjlane 

which recall the foregrounds in the brilliant paintings 
of Van Eyck. 

The reader of Puritan history is reminded of that 
mournful day after the battle of Chalgrove Field, 
when the body cf John Hampden was brought home. 
As many soldiers as could be spared accompanied it, 
marching with arms reversed and muffled drums, 
while, with uncovered heads, they chanted the solemn 
words of comfort that begin the ninetieth Psalm : 
" Lord, Thou hast been our dwelling-place in all 
generations,"' They laid him in a grave within the 
chancel, which still remains unmarked ; it is close 
beside the slab on which he had written his beauti- 
ful epitaph to his wife. When they marched back 
beneath the beeches their voices rang out with the 
lines of Psalm Forty-three: "Why art thou cast 
down, O my soul? and why art thou disquieted 
within me? hope in God." Says a writer of that 
time : " Never were heard such piteous cries at the 
death of one man, as at Master Hampden's." 

Within the spacious mansion, which once was red 
brick and now is covered with gray plaster, are 
various relics of Hampden and Cromwell, and a por- 
trait of Queen Elizabeth in the room which she 
occupied on her visit here. Two miles further, on 
one of the finest estates in the county, is Chequer's 
Court, an imposing brick mansion of the Tudor 



flDilton's England 119 

period, once owned by Cromwell's youngest daughter 
and her husband. It stands in a park, and contains 
the greatest collection of Cromwelliana in the king- 
dom. But these and the Hampden relics owned 
by the Earl of Buckingham at Great Hampden are 
rarely shown to visitors who do not apply in writing 
some time in advance of their visit. It is to be hoped 
that some day the nation may own these and make 
them freely accessible to all scholars. Through a 
circuitous drive between beautiful fields of grain, in 
view of the Chiltern Hills, the traveller reaches the 
old parish church at Great Kimble, where John 
Hampden, the sturdy cousin of Cromwell, in 1635 
made his refusal to pay King Charles's demands 
for ship money. Near by lies the field whose tax 
was in question. The sum was paltry, — only 
twenty shillings, — but, like George Third's tax on 
tea in the colonies, the refusal to pay it meant war 
in the end. This whole section of beautiful Bucks 
is rich with memories of Milton, and of the men 
whom he knew and loved. 

Eli wood records that " when the city was cleansed 
and become safely habitable," the Miltons returned 
to Artillery Walk. This must have been about 
March, 1666. The open fields close to their house 
had been filled with the bodies of thousands of the 
plague victims, many of whom were uncoffined. 



i2o flMlton's Enolanfc 

Thereafter it was made a regular cemetery, and was 
surrounded with a brick wall, and became what 
Southey called, " the Campo Santo of the Dis- 
senters.'' On a side street near by, next to a kind 
of institutional meeting-house belonging to the 
Friends, is a beautiful green inclosure where fourteen 
thousand Quakers lie buried in unmarked graves. 
One humble headstone alone marks a grave near 
the fence, which was opened in the nineteenth cen- 
tury, and was found to be that of Milton's con- 
temporary, — George Fox, — the tailor with the 
leather suit, who founded the sect of the uncompro- 
mising democrats who called no man " Lord," who 
used no weapons but their tongues, and who thun- 
dered with them to such purpose as to make men 
quake. 

While Milton was on the point of publishing his 
" Paradise Lost," another calamity, to be described 
later, befell the stricken city. For three days the 
Great Fire crackled and roared, and drove man and 
beast before its fearful heat westward to Temple Bar, 
and swept away Milton's birthplace, which he still 
owned. It wiped out the church where he was christ- 
ened, the school where he had studied, and came so 
far north as almost to bury his father's grave under 
the walls of St. Giles's. Cripplegate. Amid the 
horror of smoke and the sound of distant explosions 



flDUtcm'3 England 121 

and wild confusion, the poet sat during those awful 
days, when it seemed as if the fate of Sodom had 
befallen his dear London town. Up to that date his 
birthplace had been visited by admiring foreigners. 
This was the only real estate that he then owned, and 
its loss must have crippled his resources. 

The precious manuscript of " Paradise Lost " fell 
to the censorship of the young clergyman of twenty- 
eight, who had married Milton to his youthful wife, 
Elizabeth. This man, named Tomkyns, like Pobedo- 
nostzeff two hundred and fifty years later, held that 
liberty of conscience was a " highly plausible thing," 
but did not work well in practice, and he came near 
suppressing the volume, so tradition says, for imagi- 
nary treason in some lines ; but he relented, and the 
world was spared its greatest epic poem since the 
^Eneid. 

The many booksellers around St. Paul's suffered 
terrible losses, and Pepys estimates that books to the 
value of £150,000 were burnt in the vicinity. Most 
of them were hurriedly stowed in the crypt of old 
St. Paul's Church, but when the walls of the great 
cathedral fell, they let in the fire which consumed 
them. In April, 1667, when the ruins had hardly 
ceased smoking, Milton agreed, for £5 down 
and three times as much at certain future dates, to 
sell his copyright to Samuel Symons, printer. Thir- 



122 flDUton's England 

teen hundred copies constituted the edition. Through 
the days of dusty turmoil while the new city was 
slowly rising on the ashes of the old, the proof-sheets 
passed from the printing-press in Aldersgate Street 
to Artillery Walk. There was only an interruption 
of five anxious days in June, when the bugle sounded, 
and terrified citizens assembled to ward off the 
Dutch, who, bent on vengeance, burnt English ships 
and sent cannon-balls hurtling at English forts. In 
August " Paradise Lost " appeared as a rather fine 
looking, small quarto of 342 pages, which could 
be bought for three shillings in three bookstores. 
For artistic purposes the poem is written according 
to the Ptolemaic theory of cosmos, though Milton 
of course accepted the Copernican view. 

While John Milton was expecting £15 or £20 
for his work of more than seven years, John 
Dryden, who was much more in fashion in 
those days of Nell Gwynne and the reopened 
theatres, was receiving a yearly income of £700. 
But John Dryden knew a poet when he read him. 
After reading " Paradise Lost," he exclaimed : 
" This man cuts us all out. and the ancients, too." 

About 1670, Milton's three daughters left their 
father's home. Knowing that they needed to be 
fitted for self-support, he paid for their apprentice- 
ship, and had them taught embroidery in gold and 



/IDUton's Englano 123 

silver. Doubtless bright silks and gay patterns were 
much more to their mind than their father's folios, 
and the change was best for all concerned. Their 
father sat at his door on pleasant days, dressed in 
his gray camblet coat, wearing a sword with a small 
silver hilt. He received many visitors — some of 
them men of rank and note. 

He is described as wearing at this time his light 
brown hair parted from the crown to the middle of 
the forehead, " somewhat flat, long and waving, a 
little curled." His voice was musical and he " pro- 
nounced the letter r very hard." He rose early, 
began his day by listening to the Hebrew Bible, and 
spent his morning listening and dictating. Music, 
as much walking as his gouty feet permitted, and, 
in the evening, a smoke, were his sole recreations. 
He belonged to no church, and attended no service 
at this period. 

As his end drew near he told his brother that 
he left only the residue of his first wife's property 
to their three daughters, who had " been very un-_ 
dutiful;" but everything else to his "loving wife, 
Elizabeth." Just one month before he had com- 
pleted his sixty-sixth year, John Milton died on a 
Sunday night, November 8, 1674. He was buried 
beside his father in St. Giles's, Cripplegate, and was 
followed to the grave by many friends. What 



124 flMitcm's England 

hymns were sung we do not know, but certainly 
none could more fitly have been sung than that noble 
one by his dear friend, Sir Henry Wotton : 

" How blessed is he born or taught 
Who serveth not another's will, 
Whose armour is his honest thought, 
And simple truth his highest skill. 



" This man is freed from servile bands, 
Of hope to rise or fear to fall ; 
Lord of himself, though not of lands, 
And having nothing, yet hath all." 

Milton's wife was thirty-six years old when the 
poet died. She lived to be nearly eighty-nine years 
old, but never remarried. Deborah lived until 1727, 
when Voltaire writes : " I was in London when it 
became known that a daughter of blind Milton was 
still alive, old and in poverty, and in a quarter of 
an hour she was rich." The latest descendants of 
John and Christopher Milton died about the middle 
of the eighteenth century, but their sister Anne's 
posterity may perhaps be traced to-day. 

The forgotten Duke of York has his great column 
in Waterloo Place. The scholarly but uninspired 
Prince Consort has his gorgeous Memorial, and a 
hundred nobodies have their lofty monuments scat- 
tered all over England, teaching the rising genera- 



/HMlton's Enalanfc 125 

tion their fathers' estimation of the relative worth 
of names in England's history. The only statue of 
Milton known to me in England, except the one 
on the London University Building, is the modest 
figure which stands, together with Shakespeare and 
Chaucer, upon a fountain in Park Lane opposite 
Hyde Park. 

No student of the period which is treated in this 
little volume should fail to visit the upper floor of 
the National Portrait Gallery, and view the por- 
traits of the many noted men who were Milton's 
contemporaries. Besides portraits of the royal 
families, he will note those of William Harvey, 
Samuel Pepys, Cowley, old Parr, Sir Henry Vane, 
Andrew Marvell, Cromwell and his daughter, Inigo 
Jones, Selden, Sir Julius Caesar, Samuel Butler, 
Hobbes, Dryden, Ireton, Algernon Sidney, Sir 
Christopher Wren, and the Chandos Shakespeare 
portrait. Milton's own portrait in middle life, which 
is little known, is most impressive, and very different'' 
from the common portraits. 




CHAPTER VIII. 

THE TOWER. TOWER HILL 

|XCEPT Westminster Abbey, no spot in 
England is so connected with every phase 
of England's history as is the Tower of 
London. A map, printed in the generation before 
Milton, shows us the ancient moat full of water, and 
the space within its walls that now is gravelled then 
covered with greensward. North of St. Peter's little 
church, where lay the bones of Anne Boleyn. 
stretched a row of narrow gabled houses like those 
seen in the neighbouring London streets. The 
White Tower, built by William the Conqueror, 
stands to-day practically as it stood in William's 
time and Milton's. Built of durable flint stones, it 
has withstood time's decay as few other buildings 
erected far more recently have done, when they were 
of the soft, disintegrating quality of stone so often 
used in London. True. Christopher Wren faced 
the windows with stone in the Italian style, and 
somewhat modernised the exterior, but the interior 
126 



/IDilton's England 127 

remains practically as it was built over eight hun- 
dred years ago. 

As there is no need of duplicating here the main 
facts about its history, which are to be found in every 
guide-book, let us confine ourselves to the chief 
literary and historical associations with it, that must 
have appealed to the boy and man, John Milton. 

One can imagine few things more exciting and 
stimulating to the mind of an observant boy in 
1620 than a visit to the Tower. In the days when 
circuses were unknown, and menageries of strange 
beasts were a rare sight, the view of such behind the 
grated walls of Lion's Tower must have delighted 
any London lad. The wild beasts were not very 
numerous, — only a few lions and leopards and " cat 
lions," — but no doubt they were as satisfactory as 
the modern " Zoo " to eyes that were unsatiated 
with such novelties. Whether small boys were al- 
lowed for sixpence to see the rich display of state 
jewels is not quite clear, yet it is certain that they 
were shown to strangers. 

Says that indefatigable antiquarian, Stow, whose 
old age almost touched the babyhood of Milton : 
" This Tower is a citadel to defend or command the 
city; a royal palace for assemblies or treaties; a 
prison of state for the most dangerous offenders; 
the only place of coinage for all England at the 



i28 flDilton's JEnolanfc 

lime ; the armory for warlike provisions ; the treas- 
ury of the ornaments and jewels of the Crown ; and 
general conserver of the records of the king's courts 
of justice at Westminster." 

In Milton's boyhood, the royal palace in the south- 
east corner of the inclosure was standing. But in 
his manhood, his staunch friend, Oliver, having got 
possession, it was pulled down. The little Norman 
chapel of St. John, within the Tower, is one of the 
best bits of Norman work now extant in England. 
Its triforium, which extends over the aisles and semi- 
circular east end, probably was used in ancient days 
to permit the queen and her ladies to attend the 
celebration of the mass, unseen by the congregation 
below. The chapel was dismantled before Milton's 
time. But doubtless as he entered it he could pic- 
ture in it, more vividly than we in our later age, that 
scene when from sunset until sunrise forty-six noble- 
men and gentlemen knelt and watched their armour, 
before King Henry IV., on the next day, bestowed 
upon them the newly created Order of the Bath. 

In this chapel, while he was kneeling in prayer, 
the lieutenant of the Tower received an order to 
murder the young Edward V. and his brother, and 
refused to obey it. Here Queen Mary attended mass 
for her brother, Edward VI. 

In the present armory, once the council chamber, 






flDUton's Bnalant) 129 

King Richard II. was released from prison, and 
sceptre in hand and the crown on his head, abdicated 
in favour of Henry IV. Shakespeare thus depicts 
the scene, and puts the following words into the 
mouth of the mournful king : 

" I give this heavy weight from off my head, 
And this unwieldy sceptre from my hand, 
The pride of kingly sway from out my heart; 
With mine own tears I wash away my balm, 
With mine own hands I give away my crown, 
With mine own tongue deny my sacred state, 
With mine own breath release all duteous oaths, 
My manors, rents, revenues I forego ; 
My acts, decrees, and statutes I deny. 
God pardon all oaths that are broke to me, 
God keep all oaths unbroke are made to thee. 
Make me that nothing have with nothing grieved, 
And thou with all pleased that hath all achieved! 
Long may'st thou live in Richard's seat to sit, 
And soon lie Richard in an earthen pit ! 
God save King Henry, unkinged Richard says, 
And send him many years of sunshine days ! " 

On this same spot, in 1483, the Protector, after- 
ward Richard III., came in among the lords in 
council, and asked the Bishop of Ely to send to 
his gardens in Ely Place, off Holborn, for some 
strawberries. The terror which royalty inspired — 
and with good reason in that day — is well described 
by Sir Thomas More, who was himself a prisoner in 



13° /JDilton's Encjlanfc 

less than a half century after the scene which he 
so graphically describes : 

" He returned into the chamber, among them, all 
changed, with a wonderful sour, angry countenance, 
knitting the brows, frowning and frothing and 
gnawing of the lips; and so sat him down in his 
place, all the lords much dismayed and sore mar- 
velling of this manner of sudden change, and what 
thing should him ail." Then asking what should 
be the punishment of those who conspired against 
his life, and being told that they should be punished 
as traitors, he then accused his brother's wife and 
his own wife. " ' Then/ said the Protector," con- 
tinues More, " ' ye shall see in what wise that sorcer- 
ess and that other witch . . . have by their sorcery 
and witchcraft wasted my body ! ' And therewith 
he plucked up his doublet sleeve to his elbow upon 
his left arm, and he shewed a werish withered arm. 
and small as it was never other. And thereupon 
every man's mind sore misgave him, well perceiving 
that this matter was but a quarrel ... no man was 
there present but well knew that his arm was ever 
such since his birth. Nevertheless the lord chamber- 
lain answered, and said : ' Certainly, my lord, if they 
have so heinously done they be worthy heinous pun- 
ishment.' ' What,' quoth, the Protector. ' thou serv- 
est me ill with ifs and with ands; I tell thee they 



flMlton's England 131 

have so done, and that I will make good on thy 
body, traitor! ... I will not to dinner until I see 
lhy head off.' Within an hour, the ]ord chamber- 
lain's head rolled in the dust." 

The author of the " Utopia," being a knight, was 
leniently treated while in the Tower. He paid 
ten shillings a week for himself and five shillings 
for his servant. Occasionally his friends came to 
see him, and urged in vain that he should propitiate 
Henry VIII. and his wife, Anne Boleyn, against 
whose marriage he had objected. But he remained 
immovable. " Is not this house as nigh heaven as 
my own? " he asked, serenely, when wife and daugh- 
ters pleaded with him to reconsider. Lady More 
petitioned Henry for her husband's pardon, on the 
ground of his illness and her poverty ; she had been 
forced to sell her clothing to pay her husband's fees 
in prison. But Henry had no mercy on the gentle 
scholar, the greatest English genius of his day, and 
who had been lord chancellor of England. 

For a time he was allowed to write, but later, 
books and writing materials were removed; yet he 
occasionally succeeded in writing to his wife and 
daughter Margaret on scraps of paper with pieces 
of coal. " Thenceforth," says his biographer, " he 
caused the shutters of his cell to be closed, and spent 
most of his time in the dark." 



132 flMlton's Enolanfc 

When the end came, his sentence to be hanged at 
Tyburn was commuted by the king to beheadal at 
Tower Hill. Cheerful, and even with a tone of jest, 
he said to the lieutenant on the scaffold, " I pray 
thee, see me safely up, and for my coming down, let 
me shift for myself." He removed his beard from 
the block, saying, " it had never committed treason," 
and told the bystanders that he died " in and for the 
faith of the Catholic Church," and prayed God to 
send the king good counsel. More's body was buried 
in St. Peter's Church, where that of the fair young 
Anne Boleyn herself was soon to lie. His head, 
after the savage custom of the time, was parboiled 
and affixed to a pole on London Bridge. 

Dark and bloody were the associations that centre 
around the Tower in the century preceding Milton's. 
Few of these have touched the popular heart more 
than those which cluster around the girl-queen of 
nine days — the fair Lady Jane Grey. In the Brick 
Tower, where she was imprisoned, she wrote her last 
brave, pathetic words to her father and sister upon 
the leaves of her Greek Testament. From her prison 
window she saw the headless body of her boy- 
husband pass by in a cart from Tower Hill, and 
cried: "Oh. Guildford! Guildford! the antepast 
is not so bitter that thou hast tasted, and which I 
soon shall taste, as to make my flesh tremble; it 



flMlton's England 133 

is nothing compared with that feast of which we 
shall partake this day in heaven." 

When she was ready to lay her fair young head 
upon the block, she cried : "I pray you all, good 
Christian people, to bear me witness that I die 
a true Christian woman." " Then tied she the 
handkerchief about her eyes, and feeling for the 
block, she said, 'What shall I do? Where is it?' 
One of the standers-by guiding her thereunto, she 
laid her head down upon the block, and then 
stretched forth her body, and said : ' Lord, into 
thy hands I commend my spirit.' " So perished this 
girl of eighteen, whose beauty, learning, and tragic 
fate make her one of the most pathetic figures in 
history. 

The most interesting parts of the Tower, includ- 
ing St. Peter's Church, the dungeons, Raleigh's cell, 
and the spot where he wrote his " History of the 
World," are not shown to ordinary visitors. They 
can be seen, however, by the receipt of a written 
order from the Constable of the Tower, and should 
not be missed by any student of English history. 
Even a few moments spent in those dark lower vaults 
help the torpid imagination of those who live in 
freedom as cheap and common as the air they 
breathe to realise through what horror and bloody 
sweat of brave men and women in the past his free- 



134 /HMlton's JEncjlant) 

dom has been bought. Though these dungeons 
now are clean and a few modern openings through 
the massive walls admit some feeble rays of light, 
it is not difficult to conjure up the black darkness, 
filth, and vermin, and noisome odours of the past, 
or the shrieks of saint or sinner, who, like Anne 
Askew and Guy Fawkes, suffered upon the rack. 
Only two years before Milton's birth, the conspira- 
tors of the Gunpowder Plot were immured in these 
dungeons, and then hanged, cut down, and dis- 
embowelled while they were still living. 

In Milton's youth, in 1630, while he was writing 
Latin verses at Christ's College, Cambridge, that 
brave, heroic, noble soul. Sir John Eliot, was com- 
mitted to the Tower. Those were sad days for 
England. Free speech in Parliament was throttled. 
The nation's ancient liberties were in jeopardy. 
Says the historian. Green : " The early struggle for 
Parliamentary liberty centres in the figure of Sir 
John Eliot. ... He was now in the first vigour 
of manhood, with a mind exquisitely cultivated, 
and familiar with the poetry and learning of his day, 
a nature singularly lofty and devout, a fearless and 
vehement temperament. But his intellect was as 
clear and cool as his temper was ardent. What he 
believed in was the English Parliament. He saw 
in it the collective wisdom of the realm, and in that 



flDUton's England 13s 

wisdom he put a firmer trust than in the statecraft 
of kings." Of the memorable scene in Parliament 
in which he moved the presentation to the king of a 
remonstrance, in the session of 1628, a letter of 
the times gives a description. By royal orders the 
Speaker of the House stopped him, and Eliot sat 
abruptly down amid the solemn silence of the mem- 
bers. " Then appeared such a spectacle of passions 
as the like had seldom been seen in such an assembly ; 
some weeping, some expostulating, some prophesy- 
ing of the fatal ruin of our kingdom, some playing 
the divines in confessing their sins and country's 
sins. . . . There were above an hundred weeping 
eyes, many who offered to speak being interrupted 
and silenced by their own passions." 

Says President Theodore Roosevelt of Sir John 
Eliot : " He took his stand firmly on the ground that 
the king was not the master of Parliament, and of 
course this could but mean ultimately that Parlia- 
ment was master of the king. In other w T ords, he 
was one of the earliest leaders of the movement 
which has produced English freedom and English 
government as we now know them. He was also 
its martyr. He was kept in the Tower, without air 
or exercise, for three years, the king vindictively 
refusing to allow the slightest relaxation in his con- 
finement, even when it brought on consumption. 



13G flDtlton's England 

In December, 1632, he died; and the king's hatred 
found its last expression in denying to his kinsfolk 
the privilege of burying him in his Cornish home." 

At last the " man of blood," who had tried to 
wrest England's liberties, himself perished upon the 
scaffold at Whitehall, and in his condemnation the 
same author cites his treatment of Sir John Eliot as 
one of his greatest crimes. " Justice was certainly 
done, and until the death penalty is abolished for all 
malefactors, we need waste scant sympathy on the 
man who so hated the upholders of freedom that 
his vengeance against Eliot could be satisfied only 
with Eliot's death; who so utterly lacked loyalty, 
that he signed the death-warrant of Strafford when 
Strafford had merely done his bidding; who had 
made the blood of Englishmen flow like water, to 
establish his right to rule; and who, with incurable 
duplicity, incurable double-dealing, had sought to 
turn the generosity of his victorious foes to their 
own hurt." 

These grisly tales of executions and of scenes of 
fortitude we close with a few words on that valiant, 
noble soul. Sir Harry Vane, to whom Milton dedi- 
cated the well-known sonnet beginning: "Vane, 
young in years, but in sage counsel old." 

Speaking before the Phi Beta Kappa of Harvard 
University, Wendell Phillips, America's silver- 



/DMlton's England 137 

tongued orator, uttered a memorable word upon the 
man whose governorship of Massachusetts for two 
years of its infant history makes the name of Vane 
for ever dear to the American descendants of the 
Puritans : 

"... Roger Williams and Sir Harry Vane, the 
two men deepest in thought and bravest in speech of 
all who spoke English in their day, and equal to any 
in practical statesmanship. Sir Harry Vane — in 
my judgment the noblest human being who ever 
walked the streets of yonder city — I do not forget 
Franklin or Sam Adams, Washington or Fayette, 
Garrison or John Brown. But Vane dwells an 
arrow's flight above them all, and his touch conse- 
crated the continent to measureless toleration of 
opinion and entire equality of rights. We are told 
we can find in Plato ' all the intellectual life of 
Europe for two thousand years.' So you can find in 
Vane the pure gold of two hundred and fifty years 
of American civilisation, with no particle of its 
dross. Plato would have welcomed him to the 
Academy, and Fenelon kneeled with him at the altar. 
He made Somers and John Marshall possible; like 
Carnot, he organised victory; and Milton pales 
before him in the stainlessness of his record. He 
stands among English statesmen preeminently the 
representative, in practice and in theory, of serene 



ijs flMlton's JEnglan& 

faith in the safety of trusting truth wholly to her 
own defence. For other men we walk backward, 
and throw over their memories the mantle of charity 
and excuse, saying reverently, ' Remember the temp- 
tation and the age.' But Vane's ermine has no stain ; 
no act of his needs explanation or apology; and in 
thought he stands abreast of the age — like pure 
intellect, belongs to all time. Carlyle said, in years 
when his words were worth heeding, ' Young men, 
close your Byron and open your Goethe.' If my 
counsel had weight in these halls, I should say. 
' Young men, close your John Winthrop and Wash- 
ington, your Jefferson and Webster, and open Sir 
Harry Vane.' It was the generation that knew Vane 
who gave to our Alma Mater for a seal the simple 
pledge, Veritas." — Wendell Phillips, in his Har- 
vard address on the "Scholar in the Republic." 

To the profligate Charles II. few men must have 
seemed more dangerous than the man who had 
dared to teach that the king had three " superiors, 
God, Law, and Parliament." The man who had 
once walked through the stately halls of Raby Castle 
as its master found a Tower cell his last earthly 
abiding-place. 

When Sir Harry Vane was arraigned as a " false 
traitor," he made his own defence, well knowing 
what the end would be, but determined, for the sake 



flDUton's Enolanfc 139 

of England and the cause he loved, to put his plea on 
record. For ten hours he fought for his life without 
refreshment, then later, in his prison, wrote out the 
substance of his plea. Though, as his biographer 
relates, " he had torn to pieces as if they were so 
much rotten thread the legal meshes in which his 
hunters sought to hold him fast," his doom was 
sealed. Something was gained when the original 
sentence of hideous torture and dismemberment was 
commuted into simple beheading. The day before 
his execution. Vane said to his children : " Resolve 
to suffer anything from men rather than sin against 
God. ... I can willingly leave this place and out- 
ward enjoyments, for those I shall meet with here- 
after in a better country. I have made it my 
business to acquaint myself with the society of 
Heaven. Be not you troubled, for I am going home 
to my Father." 

" As one goes through Eastcheap to-day, out 
upon the open space of Tower Hill, he finds himself 
among prosaic surroundings. Over the pavement 
rattles the traffic from the great London docks close 
at hand. High warehouses rise at the side; the 
sooty trail of steamers pollutes the air toward the 
river. In one direction, however, the view has sug- 
gestions the reverse of commonplace. Looking 
thither the sensitive beholder feels with deep emotion 



i4° fllMlton's lEnolano 

the fact brought home to him, that to men of Eng- 
lish speech, the earth has scarcely a spot more mem- 
orable than the ground where he is standing. 
There rise, as they have risen for eight hundred 
years, the gray walls of the Tower, — the moat in 
the foreground, the battlemented line of masonry 
behind; within, the white keep, with its four turrets. 
... As mothers have shed tears there for impris- 
oned children, so children standing there have won- 
dered which blocks in the grim masonry covered 
the dungeons of their fathers and mothers. Again 
and again, too, through the ages, all London has 
gathered, waiting in a hush for the dropping of the 
drawbridge before the Byward Tower, and the com- 
ing forth of the mournful train, conducting some 
world-famous man to the block draped with black, 
on the scaffold to the left, where the hill is highest. 
. . . On the 14th of June in 1662 in the full glory 
of the summer. Vane, in the strength of his man- 
hood, was brought forth to die." Thus writes 
James K. Hosmer in his scholarly biography of 
Vane. He quotes an eye-witness, who relates how 
cheerfully and readily Vane went from his chamber 
to the sledge which took him to the scaffold, and 
how " from the tops of houses, and out of windows, 
the people used such means and gestures as might 
best discover, at a distance, their respects and love 



fllMlton's England m^ 

to him, crying aloud, ' The Lord go with you, the 
great God of Heaven and Earth appear in you 
and for you.' When asked how he did, he answered, 
' Never better in my life.' Loud were the acclama- 
tions of the people, crying out, ' The Lord Jesus 
go with your dear soul.' " As Vane stepped upon 
the scaffold, clad in a black suit and cloak and scarlet 
waistcoat, a silence fell, and calmly, serenely, he 
addressed the throng around him. His address dis- 
pleased the officers, and the trumpets were com- 
manded to silence him. His words, however, had 
been well prepared and delivered in writing to a 
friend, so that the world to-day knows with what 
dignity and truth he spoke. His prayer, however, 
was not thus broken. " Thy servant, that is now 
falling asleep, doth heartily desire of thee, that thou 
shouldst forgive his enemies, and not lay this sin 
to their charge. ... I bless the Lord that I have 
not deserted the righteous cause for which I suffer." 
The heads of Cromwell and Bradshaw hung on 
the poles of Westminster Hall when Vane's fell. 
Blake's and Ireton's bodies had been flung into dis- 
honoured graves. Pym and Hampden had died 
early in the civil strife. Algernon Sidney was to 
be a later victim. In Jewin Street the blind Milton 
was solacing himself in an uncertain seclusion and 
quietude, with the preparation of his " Paradise 



i42 /IMlton's England 

Lost." Everything the Puritans had stood for 
seemed eclipsed. But the truths these men had lived 
and died for could not die. Says Lowell, writing 
for his countrymen : " It was the red dint on 
Charles's block that marked one in our era." 

The reign of the Stuarts was doomed, and the 
Nemesis of what they stood for was assured. Says 
John Richard Green : " England for the last two 
hundred years has done little more than carry out in 
a slow and tentative way, but very surely, the pro- 
gramme laid down by Vane and his friends at the 
close of the Civil War." It was government of 
the people, by the people, for the people, for which 
Vane and Washington and Lincoln lived. Without 
the foresight and the valour of the brave man who 
died on Tower Hill the work accomplished by the 
two later heroes might not have been assured. 




CHAPTER IX. 

ALL HALLOWS, BARKING. ST. OLAVE's. ST. 

CATHERINE CREE's. ST. ANDREW UNDER- 

SHAFT 

?T the end of Great Tower Street is the 
church of All Hallows, Barking, anciently 
known as " Berkynge Church by the 
Tower." The edifice, which is situated close to 
Mark Lane Station on the Metropolitan Railway, 
ranks as the oldest parish church with a continuous 
history as such in the city of London. One hundred 
and fifty years before the union of the seven king- 
doms under Egbert, over four hundred years before 
the Conqueror and the building of the White Tower, 
a thousand years before the boy Milton visited its 
historic site, the foundation of the church was laid. 
For six hundred years a close connection existed 
between the court and this church when the Tower 
was a royal residence. 

Some traces of old Norman work remain, but the 
present building belongs to the Perpendicular type, 



144 /IMlton's lEnglanb 

and assumed nearly its present shape about one 
hundred years before Milton's age. 

From its nearness to the Tower, the church be- 
came the burial-place of some of its victims. Here 
was placed the headless body of Lord Thomas 
Grey, uncle of Lady Jane, who was beheaded in 
1554 for taking part in the rebellion under Wyatt. 
The heart of Richard the Lion Heart was once 
placed under its high altar. After his execution on 
Tower Hill, the body of Archbishop Laud rested 
here some years, and was " accompanied to earth 
with great multitudes of people, whom love or 
curiosity or remorse of conscience had drawn to- 
gether, and decently interred . . . according to the 
rites and ceremonies of the Church of England, in 
which it may be noted as a remarkable thing, that 
being, whilst he lived, the greatest champion of the 
Common Prayer Book ... he had the honour, 
being dead, to be buried in the form therein pro- 
vided, after it had been long disused and almost 
reprobated in most of the churches of London." 

Two hundred and fifty years later an Archbishop 
Laud Commemoration was celebrated here, and 
where the scaffold stood on Tower Hill services 
were held. 

The chief interest of the church for American vis- 
itors may be the baptismal register, in which is 



/IDilton's England us 

recorded the baptism, during Milton's early man- 
hood, of Sir William Penn's infant son, the apostle 
of peace, who was destined to found a great state 
in the New World. The Great Fire of 1666 touched 
the church so closely that Pepys tells us the " dyall 
and part of the porch was burnt." Its interior is 
beautifully preserved. Its old brasses attract so 
many who desire to make rubbings that a snug sum 
for church purposes has been raised by the small 
fees charged. The church possesses the oldest 
indenture for the construction of an organ known 
in England. Its date is 15 19. 

On the south side of Tower Street, at number 48, 
was formerly a public house painted with the head 
of the Czar of Muscovy. Here Peter the Great, 
when he was studying the dockyards and maritime 
establishments of England under William III., used 
to resort with his attendants and smoke his pipe 
and drink beer and brandy. Near by is Muscovy 
Court, a present reminder of the ancient name. 

A little farther north, on Hart Street, once stood 
the richly decorated timber house, called " Whit- 
tington's Palace." According to doubtful tradition 
this was where the famous Dick Whittington, with 
princely magnanimity, burnt the royal bond for a 
debt of £60,000, when Henry V. and his queen came 
to dine with him. " Never had king such a subject," 



146 /HMlton's Enolano 

Henry is reported to have said, when YVhittington 
replied to the hero of Agincourt, " Surely, Sire, 
never had subject such a king." This palace, with 
its whole from of diamond-paned windows, stood 
in Milton's time. 

Near by, on Hart Street, is the church of St. 
Olave, which with All Hallows, Barking, escaped 
the Great Fire, and stands as it stood in Milton's 
life. The tourist must time his visit to it on a 
week day to the noon hour, as, unlike All Hallows, 
Barking, it is not open all day. 

The monastery of the Crutched Friars must have 
covered in ancient days a large part of the parish 
of this church. Its dimensions are of the smallest 
— it is only fifty-four feet long. Its name takes 
us back to the times of the Danish settlement, for 
St. Olave is but the corruption of St. Olaf, the 
Norwegian saint who was the martyred king of 
the Northmen. The body of this saint rests in 
the great cathedral at Trondheim, Norway. His 
history is closely connected with the immediate 
region. As a boy of twelve he started on his career 
as viking; later he fought with Ethelred against 
the usurping Danes in London. The latter held 
the bridge which connected the walled town with 
low-lying Southwark across the Thames. The 
si niggle waxed desperate, when the bold Norwegian 



/BMlton's Bnalanfc 147 

at a critical juncture fastened cables to the bridge, 
and then ordered his little ships, which were attached 
to them, to row hard down stream. The piles tot- 
tered, the bridge, which swarmed with the Danes, 
fell, and those that were not drowned were driven 
away. When William the Conqueror sailed up 
the Thames a half century later, the stories of the 
intrepid Olaf, who had become Norway's king and 
had died in battle, must have been fresh in mind. 

Not only this church, but others in the city were 
erected in his name. The present structure was 
probably built about 1450, and was repaired about 
the time that Milton returned to London from Italy. 

During the Reformation, in 1553, St. Olave's had 
" a pair of organes." During the Civil War in 
1644, an ordinance was passed that all organs in 
churches " should be taken away and utterly de- 
faced." It is very certain that the music-loving 
Milton, who joyed to hear 

"... the organ blow, to the full-voiced choir below " 

must have mourned this stern decree. In conse- 
quence of this, most organ builders for sixteen years 
were obliged to work as carpenters and joiners. 

The famous diarist, Pepys, who attended St. 
Olave's, writes on June 17, 1660: "This day the 
organs did begin to play at Whitehall Chapel, where 



148 flMlton's j£nolan& 

I heard very good musique, the first time that ever I 
remember to have heard the organs and singing 
men in surplices in my life." On April 20, 1667, he 
records : " To Hackney Church, and found much 
difficulty to get pews. That which I went chiefly 
to see was the young ladies of the schools, whereof 
there is great store, very pretty, and also the organ, 
which is handsome, and tunes the psalms and plays 
with the people, which is mighty pretty, and makes 
me mighty earnest to have a pair at our church " 
— which meant St. Olave's. 

About the time of Pepys's writing, a peal of six 
remarkably sweet-toned bells was placed in the 
tower. In the church are quaint brasses and monu- 
ments, the most interesting of which is the tomb 
of Pepys. An elegant monument of alabaster, with 
a bust of Pepys, taken from his portrait in the 
National Gallery, was unveiled in 1884. It bears 
the dates: " b. 1632, d. 1703." The monument 
is near the door where Pepys used to enter the 
church from Seething Lane. 

Pepys, like Milton, was educated at St. Paul's 
School. His fame rests chiefly on his diary, which 
was written in cipher, and not deciphered and pub- 
lished until 1825. On the unveiling of his monu- 
ment, James Russell Lowell, in his address, spoke 
of Pepys as " a type perhaps of what is now called 



flDUton's Englanfc 149 

a Philistine. We have no word in English which 
is equivalent to the French adjective ' bourgeois,' 
but at all events, Samuel Pepys was the most per- 
fect type that ever existed of the class of people 
whom this word describes. He had all its merits, 
as well as many of its defects." With all these 
defects, perhaps in spite of them, Lowell maintained. 
Pepys had written one of the most delightful books 
that it was man's privilege to read in the Eng- 
lish language, or in any other. There was no paral- 
lel to the character of Pepys in respect of naivete 
unless it were found in that of Falstaff, and Pepys 
showed himself, too, " like Falstaff, on terms of 
unbuttoned familiarity with himself. . . . Pepys's 
naivete was the inoffensive vanity of a man who 
loved to see himself in the glass." It was ques- 
tionable, he said, whether Pepys could have had any 
sense of humour at all, and yet permitted himself 
to be so delightful. The lightest part of the diary 
was of value historically, for it enabled us to see 
the London of two hundred years ago, and, what 
was more, to see it with the eager eyes of Pepys. 
It was not Pepys the official, the clerk of the acts 
and secretary of the Admiralty, who had brought 
that large gathering together — it was Pepys the 
diarist. 

Pepys's diary was begun in 1660, when he was 



i5° AMlton's EnQlanfc 

in his twenty-seventh year. Ten years later, when 
he feared blindness, he ceased writing it. He be- 
queathed it in six volumes, written in cipher as 
above stated, with his library of three thousand 
books, to his old college, Magdalen, at Cambridge, 
and it is now its greatest treasure. Pepys was no 
Puritan. His comments on the Calvinistic teach- 
ing of his pastor, Daniel Mills, are characteristic. 
In 1666, he writes : " Up and to church, where Mr. 
Mills, a lazy, simple sermon upon the Devil's having 
no right to anything in this world ; " and again he 
writes : " Mr. Mills made an unnecessary sermon 
on original sin, neither understood by himself nor 
the people." He writes that when he invited the 
reverend gentleman to dinner on a Sunday, he 
" had a very good dinner and very merry," 

Among the notable men buried near Pepys is 
William Turner, an early Puritan, who was educated 
under Latimer and died in 1568. He wrote the 
earliest scientific work by any Englishman on 
botany. His great object was to learn the materia 
medica of the ancients throughout the vegetable 
kingdom. But he wrote against the Roman Anti- 
christ as well. The title of one book illustrates the 
orthography of his day : " The Hunting and Fynd- 
ing of the Romish Fox : which more than seven 
years hath been among the Bysshoppes of England, 



flMlton's JSnglanfc 151 

after that the Kynges Hyghnes, Henry VIII. had 
commanded hym to be driven out of hys Realme." 
Of Sir James Deane, a merchant adventurer to 
India, China, and the Spice Islands, it is recorded 
that he gave generous bequests, and directed £500 
to be expended on his funeral, a vast sum for 
those days, yet probably no more than was customary 
for wealthy men. 

Of Sir John Mennes, who is buried here, Pepys 
tells us that " he brought many fine expressions of 
Chaucer which he doats on mightily," and naively 
adds, " and without doubt he is a very fine poet." 
Droll, lively, garrulous Pepys! Who would have 
dreamed that this boyish writer was in reality a 
great military authority, and in a large measure 
responsible for the care of England's navy? 

As in All Hallows, Barking, and several old 
" city " churches, the visitor will notice in St. 
Olave's the remarkable, wrought-iron " sword- 
stands," used in Elizabeth's reign and placed in the 
pews of distinguished persons. The pulpit, with 
its elaborate carving, said to have been done by 
Grinling Gibbons, is one that was removed from 
the " deconsecrated " church of St. Benet. 

St. Olave's had one of the churchyards in which 
the victims of the plague were buried in great 
numbers, and of which Pepys writes : " It fright- 



152 flMUon's England 

ened me indeed to go through the church, to see 
so many graves lie so high upon the churchyard 
where people have been buried of the plague." The 
gruesome skulls and crossbones, carved over its 
gateway, are a dismal reminder of the horrors of 
that time. In the chapter on the " City of the 
Absent," in his " Uncommercial Traveller," Dickens 
thus graphically describes his visit to it : " One of 
my best beloved churchyards, I call the churchyard 
of Saint Ghastly Grim; touching what men in 
general call it, I have no information. It lies at the 
heart of the City, and the Blackwall Railway shrieks 
at it daily. It is a small, small churchyard, with 
a ferocious strong spiked iron gate, like a jail. This 
gate is ornamented with skulls and cross-bones, 
larger than the life, wrought in stone; but it like- 
wise came into the mind of Saint Ghastly Grim 
that to stick iron spikes atop of the stone skulls. 
as though they were impaled, would be a pleasant 
device. Therefore the skulls grin aloft, horribly 
thrust through and through with iron spears. Hence 
there is attraction of repulsion for me in Saint 
Ghastly Grim, and having often contemplated it in 
the daylight and the dark, I once felt drawn toward 
it in a thunder-storm at midnight. 'Why not?' I 
said ; ' I have been to the Colosseum by the light 
of the moon ; is it worse to go to see Saint Ghastly 



flMlton's England 153 

Grim by the light of the lightning ? ' I repaired 
to the Saint in a hackney cab, and found the skulls 
most effective, having the air of a public execution, 
and seeming, as the lightning flashed, to wink and 
grin with the pain of the spikes." 

In the chapter on " A Year's Impressions," in 
which Dickens depicts repeated visits to the deserted 
churches of the London of the past, he, with a deft 
touch, describes the commercial atmosphere which 
now impregnates all of what poetry, history, and 
romance remain to-day. 

" From Rood Lane unto Tower Street, and there- 
abouts, there was often a subtle flavour of wine. In 
the churches about Mark Lane, for example, there 
was a dry whiff of wheat, and I accidentally struck 
an airy sample of barley out of an aged hassock 
in one of them. One church near Mincing Lane 
smelt like a druggist's drawer. Behind the Monu- 
ment the service had the flavour of damaged 
oranges, which, a little farther down toward the 
river, tempered into herrings and gradually toned 
into a cosmopolitan blast of fish. . . . The dark 
vestries and registers into which I have peeped, and 
the little hemmed-in churchyards that have echoed to 
my feet, have left impressions on my memory, dis- 
tinct and quaint. In all those dusty registers that 
the worms are eating, there is not a line but made 



i54 /HMlton'3 Encjlanfc 

some heart leap, or some tears flow, in their day. 
Still and dry now, still and dry, and the old tree 
at the window, with no room for its branches, has 
seen them all out. These churches remain like the 
tombs of the old citizens who He beneath them — 
monuments of another age. They are worth a 
Sunday exploration, for they echo to the time when 
the City of London really was London; when the 
Prentices and Trained Bands were of mark in 
the state; when even the Lord Mayor himself was 
a reality.'' 

In Milton's day, on the street of the Crutched 
Friars, named from the ancient convent of Crossed 
Friars, was the row of almshouses built by Sir 
John Milborne in 1535 in honour of God and the 
Virgin. In some way, the relief of the Assumption 
of the Virgin at the entrance gate escaped destruc- 
tion by the Puritans, and remained with the alms- 
houses to a late period. To the American, to whom 
the word "almshouse" signifies the English "work- 
house,'' — an institution of paupers where all live 
in common, — little idea is conveyed of the com- 
fortable, and usually quaint and picturesque re- 
treat which " almshouse " signifies to the English 
mind. In many London suburbs one may see little 
rows of cottages within walled gardens, where, in 
quiet and comfort and serenity, aged couples spend 



/HMlton's Enalanfc 155 

their last days, in some ways the happiest of their 
lives, though it be in an almshouse. 

At 53 Fenchurch Street, in Milton's time, stood 
the Queen's Head Tavern, where the Princess Eliza- 
beth dined on pork and peas after her release from 
the Tower in 1554. The modern building erected 
on the site bears a commemorative statue of her. 

Mincing Lane, in the vicinity, was named from 
houses which belonged to the Minchuns or nuns of 
Saint Helen's. Near its entrance is the Hall of the 
Clothworkers' Company, whose badge is a ram; 
within are gilt statues of James I. and Charles I., 
which were saved from the Great Fire. Its garden 
was once the churchyard of All Hallows, Staining, 
whose fine old tower, which escaped the Fire, still 
stands as when Milton strolled past and gazed on 
it. The church, which was demolished recently, was 
reputed to have been the earliest stone church in 
the city. " Stane " is the Saxon word for stone, 
and the word " Staining " indicates the fact men- 
tioned above. 

Passing north to Aldgate, Milton must have seen 
the great gate, which was not destroyed until 1760. 
It was the chief outlet to the eastern counties from 
the time of the Romans until its destruction. 

In the dwelling over the gate, according to Loftie, 
the poet Geoffrey Chaucer lived in 1374. This 



15 6 flMlton's England 

gate, however, was pulled down just before Milton's 
birth, and rebuilt the year after he was born, in 
1609. When he saw it, a gilded statue of James I. 
adorned its eastern side, and on the west were 
statues of Peace, Fortune, and Charity. 

Aldgate to-day is the entrance into that sordid, 
dismal region, known as Whitechapel, where within 
easy walking distance from the site of the ancient 
gate is its chief attraction to all tourists. On Com- 
mercial Street, standing in a group, are the little 
church of St. Jude, and close beside it that Social 
Settlement, reared in memory of the gentle Oxford 
scholar and philanthropist, Arnold Toynbee. This 
is one of the few beautiful oases in a desert of 
squalor and commonplaceness, which the name 
Whitechapel now signifies to most readers. 

But for Milton's haunts, we need not wander 
farther east than Aldgate; for though Whitechapel 
Street was thickly lined with houses for some dis- 
tance even in his day, little of interest remains. 
Turning back through Leadenhall Street, one sees a 
little gray stone church, with a low tower and round- 
arched windows, known as St. Catherine Cree's. 
This was rebuilt in Milton's youth in 1629, and con- 
secrated two years later by the ill-fated Archbishop 
Laud. The ceremonies which he used on this occa- 
sion savoured so much of Popery, however, that 




- 






M 
hi 



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t 



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fp 




PS 



Z .= _w 



/HMlton's JEnglanfc 157 

they were later brought against him, and helped to 
accomplish his downfall. In an older church, upon 
this site, the famous Hans Holbein, to whom we are 
indebted for his portraits of Henry VIII. , Sir 
Thomas More, and other famous Englishmen, was 
buried in 1554. after his death by the plague. 
Within the church may be seen the effigy in armour 
of a man who played an important part in England 
when Milton's father was a boy. To-day, only the 
historian recalls the name of Sir Nicholas Throck- 
morton, whose daughter married Walter Raleigh, 
who was chamberlain of the exchequer, ambassa- 
dor, and chief butler of England. The stories of 
his fruitless embassy to Mary Queen of Scots to 
prevent her marriage with Darnley, and the rec- 
ords of his trial, imprisonment, and death of a 
broken heart must have been as familiar to the youth 
of Milton's time as the life of Disraeli or Joseph 
Chamberlain is to Cambridge youth to-day. 

Above the gateway, in the churchyard, is a ghastly 
memorial to the builder of it in the form of a 
shrouded skeleton on a mattress. In Shakespeare's 
time, within this churchyard, which is now much 
smaller than it was then, and is concealed by modern 
buildings, scaffolds were erected on all sides, and 
religious plays were performed on Sundays. 

Every year, on October 16th, the " lion sermon " 



158 flDiltcm's England 

is preached within the church in memory of an 
ancient worth)', who in 1648 gave it the sum of 
£200, in remembrance of his delivery from a lion's 
paws in Arabia. As at St. Olave's, the noon hour, 
when daily service is performed for the benefit of 
the one or two worshippers who may stray in. is 
the time to visit this historic church. 

The first edition of " Paradise Lost " bears the 
imprint : " Printed, and are to be sold by Peter 
Parker, under Creed Church near Aldgate, 1667.'' 
" Creed Church " was this same Catherine Cree's. 

A little north of Leadenhall, at the entrance to 
the ancient street called St. Mary Axe, stands the 
church of St. Andrew Undershaft, another of the 
churches which remain, of those that Milton saw 
within the city walls. Its name recalls the ancient 
English custom of the May-day dance. A lofty 
May-pole, higher than the tower of the church, once 
stood beside it, and was pulled down on " Evil 
May Day," in the reign of Henry VIII., about the 
time the church was built, 1520-32. It is a gray 
stone edifice, well preserved, and well worth a visit 
if for no other end than to see the tomb of the 
learned and devoted chronicler, Stow — a name dear 
to every student of ancient London and of English 
history. Of his " Survey," Loftie says : " It was a 
wonder even in the age which produced Shake- 
speare." 



/HMlton's Englanfc 159 

Stow was bred a tailor, but in middle life retired 
on a modest competence, and for forty years almost 
immediately preceding Milton's birth had with 
unparalleled industry studied the history of his city 
and native land. His collection for the Chronicles 
of England, now in the British Museum, fills sixty 
quarto volumes. Every street of London and promi- 
nent building, every church, and almost every monu- 
ment and inscription, are faithfully recorded in his 
volumes on London and Westminster. To him 
and to his editor, Strype, who has continued his 
work until a later period, modern London, and all 
who love her and her long history, owe an incalcula- 
ble debt of gratitude. 

But so little was his invaluable service recognised 
in his day that his great collection of books aroused 
suspicion in some quarters, and his outspoken words 
on public questions stirred up the jealous and 
malevolent, as his biographer shows. He was 
reduced to poverty in his old age, for he had spent 
his substance in his great enterprise. Like a genuine 
historian, he sought original sources, and " made 
use of his own legs (for he could never ride), trav- 
elling on foot to many cathedral churches and other 
places where ancient records and charters were ; and 
with his own eyes to read them." He studied the 
records in the Tower, and was expert in decipher- 



i6o flDUton'3 Enolanc> 

ing old wills and registers and muniments belonging 
to monasteries. He seems to have been somewhat 
conservative; perhaps, as his biographer suggests, 
" being a lover of antiquity and of the old Religious 
Buildings and monuments, he was the more preju- 
diced against the Reformed Religion, because of the 
havoc and destruction those that pretended to it 
made of them in those days." One instance of 
Protestant fanaticism that tended to make him more 
opposed to zeal without knowledge was that a 
curate of St. Paul's, which was his parish, inveighed 
" fervently against a long Maypole called a Shaft 
in the next Parish to his, named St. Andrew Under- 
shaft, and calling it an Idol ; which so stirred up 
the devotion of many hearers that many of them 
in the afternoon went, and with violence pulled it 
down from the place where it hung upon hooks ; and 
then sawed it into divers pieces, each householder 
taking his piece as much as hung over his door 
or stall, and afterward burnt it." 

Sir Walter Besant, in a delightful chapter in his 
" London," describes an imaginary visit to the 
learned man, and a stroll with him through the 
town five years before Milton opened his eyes in 
Bread Street : " I found the venerable antiquary 
in his lodging. He lived — it was the year before 
he died — with his old wife in a house over against 




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V--:^- ^ 


irrt'FctkDT 


mmjlMfl 




1 ' - 


liili| :? 


I,-, .#« i, 

1 .3' • 




MONUMENT TO JOHN STOW 
St. Andrew Undershaft. 



/IMlton's England 161 

the Church of St. Andrew Undershaft. The house 
itself was modest, containing two rooms on the 
ground floor, and one large room, or solar, as it 
would have been called in olden time, above. There 
was a garden at the back, and behind the garden 
stood the ruins of St. Helen's Nunnery, with the 
grounds and gardens of that once famous house, 
which had passed into the possession of the Leather- 
sellers' Company. ... I passed within, and mount- 
ing a steep, narrow stair, found myself in the library 
and in the presence of John Stow himself. The 
place was a long room, lofty in the middle, but with 
sloping sides. It was lit by two dormer windows ; 
neither carpet nor arras nor hangings of any kind 
adorned the room, which was filled so that it was 
difficult to turn about in it, with books, papers, 
parchments, and rolls. They lay in piles on the 
floor, they stood in lines and columns against the 
walls; they were heaped upon the table. I ob- 
served too that they were not such books as may be 
seen in a great man's library, bound after the 
Italian fashion, with costly leather, gilt letters, 
golden clasps, and silken strings. Not so; these 
books were all folios for the most part ; their backs 
were broken ; the leaves, where any lay open, were 
discoloured, many of them were in the Gothic black 
letter. On the table were paper, pens, and ink, and 



i62 flMlton's Englanfc 

in the straight-backed armchair sat the old man 
himself, pen in hand, laboriously bending over a 
huge tome. He wore a black silk cap; his long 
white hair fell down upon his shoulders. The case- 
ments of the window stood open, and the summer 
sunshine poured warm and bright upon the scholar's 
head." 

In an age of many elaborate and tasteless monu- 
ments, Stow's is singularly interesting and tasteful 
An almost life-size figure of him is seated, dressed 
in a long robe, before a table on which rests a book 
in which he is writing. The whole is placed within 
a niche in the tomb; upon the sculptured sides, the 
artist has carved, among other devices, a beggar's 
wallet, indicative of Stow's poverty, for which 
James I. in his old age issued him letters patent per- 
mitting him to solicit aid. These letters grant " to 
our loving subject, John Stow, who hath to his own 
great charge, and with neglect to his ordinary means 
of maintenance, for the general good of Posteritie, 
as well as the present age, compiled and published 
diverse necessary books and chronicles, and there- 
fore we in recompense of his painful labours, and 
for the encouragement of the like . . . authorise 
him and his deputies to collect among our loving 
subjects their contributions and kind gratuities." 
Thus was the man who has chieflv contributed to 




< g 



/HMlton's England 163 

our knowledge of ancient London allowed in his 
extreme old age to live in unappreciation and 
neglect. 

The visitor cannot but query, as he surveys the 
handsome monument erected to him by his wife, 
how this was paid for, but there are many explana- 
tions that suggest themselves. 

Many a time may Milton as a boy and man have 
stood before this tomb, and viewed the line timber 
roof and the late Perpendicular windows, which 
to-day remain just as he saw them. If the modern 
visitor would study the fashions of his day, he can 
do no better than inspect such monuments as the 
costly Hammersley erected here. The date thereon 
is 1636, when Milton was a young man of twenty- 
eight. The absence in the life-size kneeling figure 
of the huge stiff crinoline on the tombs of a little 
earlier date shows that the fashions changed as 
sharply as in the latter half of the nineteenth cen- 
tury. The date of the handsome organ is 1695. 




CHAPTER X. 

crosby hall. st. helenas. st. ethelburga's. 

— st. Giles's, cripplegate 

iASSING by the tiny churchyard of St. 
Andrew Undershaft, by several narrow 
and obscure passages amid crowded busi- 
ness blocks, one comes upon the famous Crosby 
Hall on Bishopsgate Street. This presents to-day 
one of the most picturesque examples of the beam 
and plaster houses of the fifteenth century to be 
found in England. It was, says Stow, " the highest 
at that time in London," that is, about 1475. Doubt- 
less his reference is to a high turret which once sur- 
mounted it, but of which no traces now remain. 
This was before the more pretentious Tudor build- 
ings of the next century, of whose high towers 
Stow's biographer says : " He could not endure the 
high turrets and buildings run up to a great height, 
which some citizens in his time laid out their money 
upon to overtop and overlook their neighbours. Such 
sort of advanced works, both towers and chimneys, 
they built both in their summerhouses in Moorfields 
164 



flOtlton's Enolanfc 165 

and in other places in the suburbs, and in their dwell- 
ing houses in the City itself. They were like mid- 
summer Pageants, ' not so much for use and profit 
as for show and pleasure,' ' bewraying,' said he, ' the 
vanities of men's minds. And that it was unlike to 
the disposition of the ancient citizens, who delighted 
in the building of hospitals and almshouses for the 
poor; and therein both employed their wits, and 
spent their wealth in the preferment of the common 
commodity of this our city.' " 

Crosby House was, as Sir Thomas More relates, 
where Richard, Duke of Gloucester, " lodged him- 
self, and little by little all folks drew unto him, so 
that the Protector's court was crowded and King 
Edward's left desolate." Here he probably planned 
his treasonable and malicious scheme for the death 
of the little princes. In his play of " Richard III.," 
Shakespeare mentions Crosby Hall more than once ; 
doubtless he knew it well, for ten years before 
the birth of Milton it seems evident that he resided 
in a house hard by. It is quite certain that it is to 
his immortalising Crosby Hall that its preservation 
to this day is due, when almost everything else that 
was contemporaneous in secular architecture has 
disappeared in its vicinity. 

The building has been much restored, and its 
banquet-hall is now utilised for a first-class restau- 



i66 /HMltcn's lEnglarifc 

rant, where lie who will may dine where dukes and 
princes dined four centuries ago. Sir Thomas More 
lived here for several years, and here doubtless 
wrote his life of the base king, to the echo of whose 
voice these walls had once resounded. Sir Thomas 
sold the place to that dear friend to whom he 
wrote with a coal a sad letter of farewell from his 
Tower cell before his execution. Later, his daugh- 
ter, who loved the place where her dear father had 
passed so many days, hired it, and came here to "live. 
Some years later, in 1594, the rich mayor of 
London, Sir John Spencer, bought the plate, and 
entertained an ambassador from Henry IV. to King 
James I. An interesting incident of this visit is 
related in the memoirs of this ambassador. It ap- 
pears that much scandal had been wrought by the 
mad pranks and rioting of the attendants of former 
envoys. What, then, was the horror of the French 
duke, when he discovered that one of the young 
nobles in his train, on going out of Crosby Hall in 
quest of sport, had got into a fight and murdered 
an English merchant close by in Great St. Helen's. 
The duke, determined on making an example, bade 
all his servants and attendants range themselves in 
a row against the wall, and taking a lighted torch. 
he looked sharply in the face of each in turn until 
he found the terrified face of the guilty man. Deter- 



/HMlton's England 167 

mined to wreak speedy vengeance, he ordered, after 
the arbitrary method of the times, his instant decapi- 
tation. But the lord mayor pleaded for mercy, and 
the youth's life was spared; whereupon, the duke 
records, " the English began to love, and the French 
to fear him more." 

This same Lord Spencer, Mayor of London, had 
one fair daughter, a gay deceiver of her honoured 
sire, and as much a lover of fine clothes and service 
as anv modern dame who orders gowns from 
Worth's, or buys her jewels on Bond Street. She 
loved, or at all events made up her mind to marry 
the Earl of Northampton, a man who was persona 
non grata to her father, who had no mind to wed 
his daughter, the greatest heiress in England, to this 
gentleman. But the young folks were not daunted. 
One day when the mayor gave a sixpence to the 
baker's boy, who had come with a covered barrow 
to bring bread, he learned later that the barrow con- 
tained not bread, but his own naughty Elizabeth, 
who was trundled off by her lover in disguise. 

When their baby came, some time later, grand- 
papa was wheedled into a reconciliation, and the gay 
young bride again lived in Crosby Place, the past 
forgiven. As an illustration of what wealthy ladies 
in Milton's boyhood demanded for their pleasure, 
a quotation from her letter written to her husband 



168 flDUton's England 

shortly after marriage, may prove entertaining : " I 
pray and beseech you to grant me, your most kind 
and loving wife, the sum of £2,600 quarterly to be 
paid. Also I would, besides that allowance, have 
£600 quarterly to be paid, for the performance of 
charitable works; and those things I would not, 
neither will be, accountable for. Also I will have 
three horses for my own saddle, that none should 
dare to lend or borrow ; none lend but I, none bor- 
row but you. Also I would have two gentlewomen 
. . . when I ride a hunting or a hawking, or travel 
from one house to another, I will have them attend- 
ing ; so for either of these said women, I must and 
will have for either of them a horse. Also I will 
have six or eight gentlemen. And I will have my 
two coaches, one lined with velvet to myself, with 
four very fine horses; and a coach for my women, 
lined with cloth and laced with gold, otherwise with 
scarlet and laced with silver, with four good horses. 
Also I will have two coachmen. Also, at any time 
when I travel, I will be allowed not only coaches and 
spare horses for me and my women, but I will be 
having such carriages as shall be fitting for all ; 
orderly, not pestering my things with my women's 
nor theirs with their chambermaids, nor theirs with 
their washmaids. . . . And I must have two foot- 
men; and my desire is that you defray all the 



/HMlton's England 169 

charges for me. And for myself, besides my 
yearly allowance, I would have twenty gowns 
of apparel. Also I would have to put me in my 
purse £2,000 and £200, and so you to pay my debts. 
Also I would have £6,000 pounds to buy me jewels, 
and £4,000 to buy me a pearl chain. Now, seeing I 
have been and am so reasonable unto you, I pray you 
do find my children apparel and their schooling, and 
all my servants, men and women, their wages. . . . 
So for my drawing-chambers in all houses, I will 
have them delicately furnished, both with hangings, 
couch, canopy, glass, carpet, chairs, cushions, and 
all things thereunto belonging. ... I pray you 
when you be an earl to allow me £2,000 more than 
I now desire, and double attendance." 

The Countess of Pembroke, sister of Sir Philip 
Sidney and friend of Ben Jonson, once lived as mis- 
tress in the halls of Crosby Place. The latter's epi- 
taph upon her is well known : 

" Underneath this sable hearse 
Lies the subject of all verse : 
Sidney's sister, Pembroke's mother. 
Death, ere thou canst find another 
Good and fair and wise as she, 
Time shall throw a dart at thee." 

Crosby Hall originally occupied far more ground 
than is indicated by that part of it which stands 



i7° flMlton's JErujlano 

to-day. A wine cellar with finely groined roof prob- 
ably belonged to a crypt of its chapel, which has 
vanished. In its great hall, fifty-four feet long and 
forty feet high, one sees to-day, in beautiful modern 
workmanship, the arms of St. Helen's Priory, the 
earliest proprietor of the place; of Sir John Crosby, 
its builder; of the "crook-backed tyrant," Richard, 
and of the wise, the gentle, the learned author of 
the " Utopia." Its " louvre," or opening in the roof, 
is found in ancient halls in lieu of a chimney. This 
hall, however, has a regular fireplace, but perhaps of 
later construction. The louvre now is closed by the 
same piece of woodwork that formerly was raised 
above it. The beautiful carved roof itself is now as 
it was over four centuries ago, the chief glory of the 
place. Beneath it the most accomplished musicians 
of the past discoursed sweet music, and the noble, 
the learned, and the fashionable gathered at the 
hospitable board. Not unlikely, the author of 
" Counts " and " Lycidas," in the days before its 
owner fought under Charles I., may have been 
among their company. 

In Milton's blind old age, Crosby Hall became a 
Presbyterian meeting-house, and for a century after- 
ward devout worshippers sang psalms beneath its 
carved oak roof, which had echoed for two hundred 
years to sounds of mirth and feasting. 



flMlton's England 171 

A little to the left of Crosby Hall, through a low 
gateway, the sightseer passes from the noisy thor- 
oughfare into a quiet court. Its pavement covers 
the ancient garden of Crosby Place. But it is 
not all paved. A small green churchyard still occu- 
pies a part of the site of the ancient priory of St. 
Helen's, and surrounds the low Gothic church to 
which one descends a few steps from the modern 
pavement. 

Helena, the mother of Constantine, according to 
tradition, discovered the tomb of Christ and there- 
upon was canonised. From remote antiquity a 
church in her honour has stood here. Three cen- 
turies before Milton's day, the Benedictine nuns 
built a priory close by the ancient church. They built 
their church, and finally, getting possession of St. 
Helen's, incorporated it with their own. To-day the 
ends of the two naves, with a little cupola at the 
intersection, present an irregular and picturesque 
aspect; the interior, likewise, by its irregularities, 
recalls the curious origin of the structure. An 
agreeable harmony of differing forms and propor- 
tions has been accomplished. The old, old church, 
dim even on a sunshiny June day, is pervaded by a 
strange charm. Business has crowded to its very 
walls; but the rumble of the streets is dulled by the 
intervening structures of modern prosaic type that 



172 /HMlton's Enolar^ 

hem in its peaceful solitude. Unlike the last three 
churches of which we have spoken, its doors are open 
all day long, and the traveller has not to make painful 
search amid warehouses and down cross streets for 
the sexton's keys. St. Helen's is large enough and 
beautiful enough to lure the frequent visitor; and 
perhaps it is a welcome refuge to many a perplexed 
and overwearied man of business, who. for a few 
moments, now and then, flees from his office and 
commercial cares, to rest and lift his thoughts to 
heavenly things within this sanctuary. 

St. Helen's is noted for its tombs, and has been 
called the Westminster Abbey of the " City." Here 
lies that noted and remarkable man. Sir Thomas 
Gresham. The visitor to the upper floor of the 
National Portrait Gallery, in those rooms where 
hang the portraits of the Elizabethan era, will 
remember the strong face and figure, elegantly clad, 
of the man whose bones rest here, and of whom we 
shall have more to say in connection with his 
college and the exchange which rose under his direc- 
tion. His monument is a large marble slab full of 
fossil shells, and raised table high. The date is 
1579. From the beautiful, great window of the 
Nun's Church, the coloured rays of his own arms fall 
on his tomb. 

Upon the wall behind it are niches ; one of them 



flDtlton's Englant) 173 

faced by a little carved arcade, through which, it 
is said, the nuns who were in disgrace listened to 
the mass from the crypt below. A large ugly piece 
of masonry on the same wall near the farther end 
once contained the embalmed body of Francis Ban- 
croft, whose face was visible through the glass lid 
of his coffin. A few years since both body and tomb 
were placed within the crypt. According to his will, 
on the occasion of an annual memorial sermon for 
which he had arranged, his body was exhibited to 
certain humble folk for whom he had erected, in 
expiation of his misdeeds, the almshouses now at 
Mile End. Browning has with characteristic power 
depicted the Roman Jew scourged to the Christian 
church, and forced to hear a sermon once a year for 
his conversion. Perhaps some later poet may find 
as gruesome a theme for his sarcastic pen in the 
scene which imagination conjures up when these 
feeble and aged recipients of the gift of this erratic 
snob were yearly brought to listen to the tale of his 
benefactions, and to gaze upon his shrivelling corpse. 
Bancroft as a magistrate had been so unpopular 
that the people tried to upset his coffin on its way to 
the tomb, and pealed the bells. 

The oldest monument in the church is to Thomas 
Langton, chaplain, buried in the choir in 1350. One 
tomb bears the remarkable name of Sir Julius 



i74 /HMlton's England 

Caesar. The inscription is in form of a legal docu- 
ment with a broken seal in which Sir Julius gives 
his bond to Heaven to surrender his life whenever it 
shall please God to call him. If one would see Sir 
Julius as Milton saw him, let him look upon his por- 
trait that hangs in the National Portrait Gallery 
with his great contemporaries. 

The obdurate father-in-law, the rich Sir John 
Spencer of Crosby Hall, is commemorated, by his 
son-in-law, the Earl of Northampton, in a stately 
alabaster tomb. The figures of Sir John and his 
wife rest under a double canopy, and at their feet 
kneels the runaway daughter, in the enormous stiff 
crinoline of 1609, the date of her father's death. 
Some thousand men in mourning cloaks are said 
to have attended his funeral. The tomb of Sir 
John Crosby and his wife, of 1475, the beautiful 
and perfectly preserved tomb of Oteswich and his 
wife, of the time of Henry IV., and the fine figure of 
a girl reading, are a few of the works of art that 
deserve careful attention. The beauty of that which 
antedates the Tudor and Stuart periods, as con- 
trasted with the works of art of those periods, is 
almost as marked as it is at Westminster Abbey. 

When Milton lived he must have seen still stand- 
ing the refectory and cloisters, and the old hall 
of the nuns, which was later used by the Company 



/IDtlton's Enolanfc 175 

of Leathersellers. The whole group of buildings, 
with the adjacent gardens, must have formed a 
highly picturesque reminder of the days before King 
" Hal " had ruthlessly swept his besom of destruc- 
tion over the many houses in the land which shel- 
tered nuns and friars. 

During Milton's life there stood on Bishopsgate 
Street the first charitable institution for the insane 
that was ever established. Its name, " Bethlehem 
Hospital," was corrupted into Bedlam, and has 
become a term of general application to scenes of 
disorder. Just after Milton's death, it was removed 
to Southwark, where the gray dome of the present 
structure rises conspicuous amid the London smoke. 

Passing northeast along the crowded thorough- 
fare of Bishopsgate Street, but a short distance from 
St. Helen's, the student of antiquities may see, al- 
most concealed by parasitic houses, the little ancient 
church of St. Ethelburga. He will need to cross 
the street in order to perceive the name inscribed 
in large letters upon the church, beneath the short 
tower and cupola, and above the clock and the shop 
that masks its front. In Milton's boyhood, this 
church was ancient, and had been standing for at 
least three hundred and fifty years, for it is men- 
tioned as early as 1366. Here Chaucer may have 
knelt to say his Paternosters. 



176 fl&tlton's England 

The visitor should time his coming to the middle 
of the day, when the door opening upon the sidewalk 
is unlocked, and he may enter into the solemn little 
sanctuary, and at the farther end step out into 
the tiny garden at the rear. Here, if it be summer, 
he may sit in this shady retreat and meditate upon 
the history of the bit of ancient wall said by the 
verger to be a Roman wall, the fragments of which 
are preserved here. The church itself is plain and 
bare; simply a Gothic nave, with no side aisles. Its 
chief interest to some may be its antique organ, of 
uncertain date, but old enough from its appearance 
to have been heard by the little lad from Bread 
Street whose soul was full of music. One can easily 
imagine the father of John Milton, who was himself 
so skilled in the great art, bringing his son to every 
church within his neighbourhood that boasted such 
an instrument. 

The church stands on the site of a much older 
one, and is named from the daughter of the French 
princess. Bertha, who brought to Canterbury, to the 
home of her Saxon husband, Ethelbert, the Christian 
religion, which was then new to pagan England. 
Visitors to the little church of St. Martin's at Can- 
terbury will recall the font in which this king was 
baptised into the faith of his wife. 

Not far down Bishopsgate Street, upon the oppo- 



/IDtlton's JEnglanfc 177 

site side from St. Ethelburga's, when Milton lived, 
stood a house with such a marvellous carved front 
with oriel windows, that when it made way for 
a modern business block, it was transferred to the 
South Kensington Museum, where it may now be 
seen in one of its lofty halls. In Milton's youth, 
Sir Paul Pindar, its owner, was the richest merchant 
in the kingdom, and often loaned money to James I. 
and his son Charles. As ambassador to Constanti- 
nople, he did much to improve England's trade in the 
East. On his return, when Milton was a schoolboy 
of a dozen years at St. Paul's School, he brought, 
among his other treasures, a great diamond, valued 
at £30,000, which he loaned to the king to wear at 
his opening of the Parliaments; it was afterward 
sold to Charles I. Twenty years later, when Crom- 
well and Milton were fighting for the rights of Eng- 
lishmen, and Charles's strength was failing, this 
same Paul Pindar provided funds for the escape of 
Queen Henrietta Maria and her children. 

He gave £10,000 for the restoration, before the 
fire, of St. Paul's Cathedral. But his loyalty to 
the house of Stuart was put to a hard test, for the 
king borrowed such enormous sums that he was 
all but ruined. When Milton walked down Bishops- 
gate Street, past his quaint dwelling-house, he must 
have seen the mulberry-trees planted in the park 



i73 /HMlton's England 

to please James I. by his devoted subject. These 
ancient mulberry-trees disappeared only within the 
memory of men now living. 

Passing westward along the northern site of the 
old city wall, in search of the few landmarks that 
escaped the Great Fire and still remain, we come to 
that church of all others most dear to Milton lovers. 
St. Giles's, Cripplegate, is not easily entered on Sun- 
day, except during hours of service. But a courteous 
question to the burly guardian of the peace who 
patrols the neighbourhood may effect an unlocking 
of the gates and a quiet stroll through the green 
garden that surrounds the church upon two sides. 
The big policeman is a good talker, and relates with 
gusto the ravages of the great fire a few years since, 
which came so near as to melt the lead upon the 
church roof. 

The massive wall which forms a corner of the 
green yard is a bastion of the city wall in the time 
of Edward IV. Possibly the long, narrow bricks 
which still gleam red in the lower part may be a 
lingering remnant of the old Roman wall. Cer- 
tainly they are the type that the Romans were wont 
to use. The policeman assures us that there are 
mysterious " submarine " passages leading from this 
wall, and one may well believe almost anything as 
one thinks of the strange sights that it has witnessed. 



flDtlton's England 179 

High walls of business blocks of nondescript style 
replace the gaps made by the recent fire, which fortu- 
nately stopped before it touched the narrow, gabled 
houses of wood which cluster close about the church. 
These give almost the only example to-day in 
London of the type of building which housed the 
poorer class of Londoners of Milton's time. 

The church is on the site of an older one of 1090, 
and was built about one hundred years before Mil- 
ton's birth. It is late Perpendicular, and has some 
good detail. 

As one enters the church from the garden, the 
first monument on his right is Milton's, which con- 
tains his bust, under a Gothic canopy. The poet's 
bones lie by his father's, under the pavement near 
the choir. According to the evidence of a little book 
written about 1790, it seems that his coffin was 
opened by irresponsible persons, who found the 
lead much decayed and easily bent back the top. 
A servant-maid for a consideration let in sightseers 
through a window, some of whom, after satisfying 
their curiosity in gazing on the well-preserved fig- 
ure, snatched hair and teeth and even an arm-bone 
to carry away as relics. A later authority questions 
whether it is certain that the grave thus desecrated 
was indeed Milton's or another's, and leaves a grain 



180 flDUton's lEnolano 

of comfort in the thought that perhaps his honoured 
remains still rest untouched by vandals. 

Within this church Ben Jonson was married in 
1623, and here Oliver Cromwell, a sturdy youth of 
twenty-one, married his bride on August 226. in 
1620. Little thought the parson, as he and Eliza- 
beth Bourchier knelt before him, to be joined in holy 
wedlock, that one day he would be entitled not only 
" Protector of England," but " Protector of Prot- 
estantism." A marvellous man, this Oliver, whose 
deeds left much to be forgiven by a later age, for 
they sometimes had more of the spirit of Joshua than 
of the Founder of the Christian Faith, and yet 
as a lover of England, and a minister to the court 
of Queen Victoria from England's lusty kin beyond 
the sea has said : 

" He lived to make his simple oaken chair 
More terrible, more grandly beautiful, 
Than any throne before or after of a British king. 



One of the few who have a right to rank 
With the true Makers ; for his spirit wrought 
Order from Chaos ; proved that right divine 
Dwelt only in the excellence of truth ; 
And far within old Darkness' hostile lines 
Advanced and pitched the shining tents of Light. 
Nor shall the grateful Muse forget to tell, 
That — not the least among his many claims 



flMlton's i£n(5lan& 181 

To deathless honour — he was Milton's friend, 
A man not second among those who lived 
To show us that the poet's lyre demands 
An arm of tougher sinew than the sword." 

— " A Glance Behind the Curtain" Lowell. 

One grave within the church may have been dear 
to Milton besides that of his honoured father. As 
he lived only one generation removed from the 
martyrs of Smithfield, he must often have pored 
over the record of their heroism and cruel deaths, 
by Fox, the famous martyrologist. Near the west 
door lies the slab above his grave. The date is 1587. 
Here, no doubt, Milton, who, as has been said, at 
different times had dwellings near the church, must 
often have entered within its doors and paused. 

Says the historian Marsden : " Fox placed the 
Church of England under greater obligations than 
any writer of his time, and had his recompense in 
an old age of poverty and shame. . . . Nor were his 
writings undervalued even then ; they were com- 
manded to be chained up in churches by the side 
of the homilies and the English Bible ; . . . thus the 
' Book of Martyrs ' stood amongst the high, au- 
thentic records of our Church, whilst its venerable 
author yet lived." 

Frobisher, the great navigator, is also buried 
within the church. 



i82 fl&tlton's England 

On the left wall, as one faces the choir, is a curi- 
ous doggerel inscription to one Busbie. If it be 
on a Sunday afternoon, and the children have 
gathered for the Sunday school, it may be interesting 
to pause a bit, as we have done, before the epitaph, 
and, while copying it, to lend a half ear to the teach- 
ing that goes on within hearing. Three small boys 
sit on a bench before a solemn youth who holds a 
book and instructs their infant minds as follows : 
"Who is God? Where is God? How many per- 
sons are there in the Godhead ? Keep still there — 
don't answer until it is your turn. When God 
put Adam and Eve out of Eden, what did he prom- 
ise them ? " " That they should be saved," mumbles 
one youngster. " Whom did he promise should 
save them ? " " His Son." " What do we call his 
Son?" "Our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ." 
The next class and all the others scattered through 
the church are progressing in Christian nurture in 
much the same way, and one wonders whether the 
pedagogical skill of the teachers has advanced one 
whit in all the hundreds of years since the church 
was built. We hear no " opening exercises," no 
joyous singing, no tender, earnest talk about right- 
doing and the temptations that little boys on Fore 
Street may encounter on Monday morning. There 
is nothing but a purely formal catechising of these 



flMlton's EnglanD 183 

eager, impressionable little souls as to a theology 
that they cannot understand, and a history of the 
world which their first lesson on geology will under- 
mine. This modern Sunday school is the one blot 
upon the memory of the beautiful old church so 
dear to every lover of Milton. 

On a week day one may stand on Redcross Street, 
and behold, as did the travellers in " The Hand of 
Ethelberta," " the bold shape of the tower they 
sought, clothed in every neutral shade, standing 
clear against the sky, dusky and grim in its upper 
stages, and hoary gray below, where every corner 
of stone was rounded off by the waves of wind and 
storm. All people were busy here; our visitors 
seemed to be the only idle persons that the city 
contained ; and there was no dissonance — there 
never is — between antiquity and such beehive 
industry. . . . This intramural stir was a fly-wheel, 
transparent by infinite motion, through which Milton 
and his day could be seen as if nothing intervened." 




CHAPTER XL 

GRESHAM COLLEGE. — AUSTIN FRIARS. GUILD- 
HALL. — st. mary's, aldermanbury. — 
Christ's hospital. — st. sepulchre's. 

|HROUGH Milton's lifetime and for nearly 
a century after, there stood on Gresham 
Street and Basinghall Street the famous 
Gresham College, founded in 1579, in honour of 
Sir Thomas Gresham, who gave the Royal Ex- 
change to the city on condition that the corporation 
should institute lectures on divinity, civil law, 
astronomy, music, geometry, rhetoric, and physics, 
to be delivered at his residence. His dwelling-house 
was a spacious edifice of brick and timber, " with 
open courts and covered walks which seemed all 
so well suited for such an intention, as if Sir Thomas 
had it in view, at the time he built his house." 
Seven professors were appointed and lectured in the 
morning in Latin, in the afternoon in English for 
two hours each day. Among the number was Sir 
Christopher Wren, who not only was the greatest 
architect, but, as is elsewhere said, was one of the 
184 



/HMlton's Englanfc 185 

famous astronomers of his day. It was out of 
his lectures on astronomy, which were attended by 
learned men, that the Royal Society originated. On 
Cromwell's death, all college matters were put in 
abeyance, and the college was temporarily turned 
into barracks, and so polluted that Bishop Sprat 
wrote to Wren that he " found the place in such a 
nasty condition, so defiled, and the smells so 
infernal, that if you should now come to make use 
of your tube [telescope] it would be like Dives 
looking out of hell into heaven." 

After the Fire, Gresham College was temporarily 
used for an Exchange, where merchants met. 
" Gresham College became an epitome of this great 
city, and the centre of all affairs, both public and 
private, which were then transacted in it." 

Except " London stone " and bits of the Old 
Wall, little more remains to consider among the 
important landmarks of the city that was nightly 
locked within the city gates, and which still endures 
after the Great Fire. Of this little part, Austin 
Friars Church, on the site of the Augustinian 
Convent, is the most notable. Of the extensive and 
magnificent establishment that was founded here 
in 1253, nothing to-day remains but the nave of the 
great church of former days, which is now reached 
through narrow passages from Old Broad Street 



186 flMlton'a England 

north of the Bank. Originally the church was cruci- 
form, with choir, transepts, and a " most fine, spired 
steeple, both small and straight." Henry VIII. at 
the Dissolution bestowed the house and grounds 
upon the first Marquis of Winchester, but the church 
was given by the young King Edward VI. " to the 
Dutch nation in London, to be their preaching 
place." From that day to this the Dutch have 
worshipped here, and in the days of persecution it 
was the religious home of other Continental refugees. 
In the generation before Milton, thousands of the 
skilled artisans of the Netherlands and France had 
fled to England, impoverishing the lands of the 
short-sighted tyrants who drove them forth, to add 
to English industry and commerce. The most emi- 
nent pastor of these exiles was a Polish nobleman, 
John a Lasco, who shepherded, not only this flock, 
but all the other foreigners in England, and super- 
intended their schools as well. He was a friend of 
Melanchthon and Erasmus, was with the latter when 
he died, and became possessed of his library. 

It was to these refugees in London, Norwich, and 
other towns that harboured them, that England 
owed the introduction of many new, choice flowers, 
among them, the gillyflower, carnation, Provence 
rose, and others. The handiwork of these indus- 
trious folk produced many new stuffs unknown to 



/iDUton's England 187 

English ladies, among others the fine light fabric 
known as bombazine. One of the Dutch ladies, who 
taught the English to starch and launder cambric 
ruffs, was so much sought after and charged such 
high fees, that she soon earned herself a competence. 
Evidently these strangers paid their way. 

The church assigned to them in London once 
possessed a marvellous array of tombs of noted men. 
The register is crowded with the names of earls and 
barons, all of whose monuments were sold by the 
impecunious and callous marquis for £100. Just 
before Milton's birth the fourth Marquis of Win- 
chester was compelled to part with all his posses- 
sions in Austin Friars. At about this time the 
tower, declared to be " one of the beauti fullest and 
rarest spectacles " in the city, was pulled down, and 
the choir and transepts were demolished. The size 
of the original building may be imagined when we 
remember that the length of the nave alone is one 
hundred and fifty feet to-day. The chronicler 
records that in the beginning of the Dutch services, 
the church was filled to overflowing. Whether there 
are fewer Dutch in London four centuries later, or 
fewer who are glad to worship in their own tongue, 
cannot be said. But to-day, the visitor, who on a 
Sunday morning walks through the silent and 
deserted streets north of the Bank of England, and 



i8S flDiltons Englanfc 

penetrates to the seclusion of Austin Friars Church, 
will find but a scant congregation of perhaps two 
hundred, who gather cosily within the curtains in 
the centre of the nave, which shut out the great bare 
aisles. If he thinks of the old days when Roger 
Williams taught Dutch to his learned pupil, John 
Milton, he may let his fancy picture to him these 
men, who ranked among the nation-builders of their 
day, stepping some Sunday morning under its Gothic 
arches from out the greensward that then surrounded 
them, and listening to the gospel in the tongue of 
those brave exiles who, like them, had fought for 
freedom of conscience. 

If the visitor waits after service, he may see in 
the pastor's room the portrait of John a Lasco. to 
whom all the congregation point back with pride, as 
the first and greatest preacher in their history ; and 
the courteous pastor may point out many things of 
interest that would escape the casual observer. 
Standing at the front of the church, beside the little 
tower at the left, whose beautiful spire no longer 
rises aloft, one finds himself in the heart of the 
modern business world, relentless, pushing, loving 
neither beauty nor the sacredness of age. One sign 
— Barnato Brothers — may attract his attention in 
a window close to the gray church walls. Here the 
ambitious and ill-starred king of African mines, 



flDilton's Enalant* 189 

Barney Barnato, brought his power to bear upon 
the men on 'Change a decade since. A decade hence 
his name, like John a Lasco's, will be remembered 
by few. These names and the associations they sug- 
gest are no unfitting theme for meditation on a 
Sunday morning stroll amid the stony streets of 
London past and present. 

Further west, amid the district swept by the 
Great Fire, stands Guildhall, not as it stood either 
before or after the fire, but still worthy of mention 
in the category of buildings that withstood the 
flames. Only the roof perished in the fire, and its 
walls stood intact; but so great have been the 
changes since their restoration that very little which 
belonged to Milton's London remains above the 
crypt. 

A clergyman, writing the year after the Great 
Fire, thus describes it, as he saw it during that terri- 
ble conflagration : " And amongst other things that 
night, the sight of Guildhall was a fearful spectacle, 
which stood the whole of it together, after the fire 
bad taken it, without flames (I suppose because the 
timber was such solid oake), like a bright shining 
wal, as if it had been a palace of gold, or a great 
building of burnished brass." 

The present roof is as nearly as possible a repro- 
duction of the one that perished in the fire: it 



i9° /HMlton's England 

is an open oak roof, and has a central louvre. The 
figures of giants in its hall represent Gog and Magog, 
who were the Corineus and Gogmagog of the ancient 
city pageants. The former was a companion of 
Brutus, the Trojan, and according to tradition killed 
Gogmagog, the aboriginal giant. 

The crypt is reputed to be the finest now remain- 
ing in London. It is a portion of the ancient hall 
of 141 1. The north and south aisles had formerly 
mullioned windows, which are now walled up. The 
vaulting, with four centred arches, is notable, and 
is probably of the earliest of that type. 

The Guildhall was founded in 141 1, in the time 
of Henry IV., and when Milton was a boy had at- 
tained a certain venerableness. Within its walls had 
taken place, not merely the civic banquets for which 
its modern successor is noted, but also many tragic 
scenes in English history. Here the evil-minded 
Protector who wished to supplant his boy-nephew, 
Edward V., had his name presented to the assembled 
multitudes as the legitimate monarch, by his oily 
courtier, Buckingham. The people, " marvellously 
abashed," listened in dead silence, as the accom- 
plished orator proclaimed the bastardy of the little 
prince, and urged the claims of his ambitious uncle. 
The speaker, somewhat disconcerted, explained 
again, louder and more explicitly, his meaning. 



flDUton's Enolanfc 191 

" But were it for wonder or fear, or that each looked 
that other should speak first, not one word was there 
answered of all the people that stood before; but all 
were as still as the midnight." Then the recorder 
was summoned to use his efforts with the people. 
" But all this no change made in the people, which 
alway after stood as they were amazed." At last 
some servants of the duke, and 'prentices and lads 
" thrusted into the hall amongst the press," began 
suddenly to cry out aloud : " King Richard, King 
Richard," and " they that stood before cast back their 
heads marvelling thereat, but nothing they said. 
And when the duke and the mayor saw this manner, 
they wisely turned it to their purpose, and said it 
was a goodly cry and a joyful to hear every man 
with one voice, and no man saying nay." Thus a 
bold coup, struck with a masterful hand, surprised 
an honest people without organised opposition and 
leadership, and as so many times in the history of 
the Anglo-Saxon race, the voice of a small and 
powerful minority was impudently declared to be 
vox populi. 

One of the saddest sights that the Guildhall 
Milton knew ever witnessed was the trial, in the 
reign of Henry VIII., of that young lady, Anne 
Askew, whose courage and devotion never were 
surpassed within the Colosseum, among the Chris- 



192 fliMltcm's England 

lians who fought with beasts or were sawn asunder. 
Having become a Protestant, she was driven by her 
husband, who was a papist, from his home. King 
Henry, it might have been supposed, would have 
at least taken no action against her, but she was 
arrested and examined. The lord mayor of London 
asked her whether the priest cannot make the body 
of Christ, to which she replied as shrewdly as 
Jeanne d'Arc to her inquisitors : " I have read that 
God made man; but that man can make God, I 
never yet read." She was condemned at Guildhall 
to death for heresy. A daughter of a knight, this 
delicate lady, reared in comfort, was carried to the 
Tower, thrust into a cell, where but for a few brave 
friends she would have starved, and then her tender 
body was put on the rack, and Chancellor Wriothes- 
ley himself applied such power as nearly rent it in 
sunder. The story of her cruel death amid the 
flames at Smithfield belongs rather to that bloody 
spot than to the Guildhall. Her life she could have 
saved, even at the last moment, had her heroic soul 
faltered, and unsaid what conscience taught. Those 
were tales to freeze the life from out young hearts, 
that grandames told in Milton's boyhood. To the 
men of his day, Guildhall stood chiefly connected 
with some of the most remarkable trials in Eng- 
land's history. 



/BMlton's lErtQlanfc 193 

Among them was that of Throckmorton for com- 
plicity in Sir Thomas Wyatt's attempt against the 
Catholic Queen Mary. In those days, when trial 
usually meant speedy death, his acquittal, due to his 
own forensic skill and eloquence, is recounted in 
detail by historians as most remarkable. He it was 
whose tomb in St. Catherine Cree's is mentioned, and 
for whom a London street is named. 

The church of St. Mary Aldermanbury is one that 
few visitors to London ever enter, but the follower 
in Milton's footsteps will not fail to seek out, a little 
west of the Guildhall, this church, whose registers 
record that here Milton, at the age of forty-eight, 
married his second wife, Katherine Woodcocke. 
Aldermanbury derives its name from the ancient 
court or bery of the aldermen, which is now held 
at the Guildhall. The church stands in its tiny green 
churchyard closely surrounded by business blocks, 
amidst the bustle of the city ; on a summer noon- 
tide, in its shady retreat, the seats are filled with 
loiterers who chat or meditate or read their papers 
around the central monument. 

This monument, though modern, is of great inter- 
est. It records the fact that J. Heminge and Henry 
Condell, Shakespeare's fellow actors and personal 
friends, lived many years in this parish, and are 
buried here. Says the inscription: "To their dis- 



194 flDilton's Englanfc 

interested affection the world owes all that it calls 
Shakespeare; they alone collected his dramatic writ- 
ings, regardless of pecuniary loss, and without the 
hope of any profit gave them to the world. 

" First Folio : ' We have but collected them, 
and done an office to the dead, without ambition 
of selfe-profit or fame, only to keep the memory of 
sc worthy a friend alive, as was our Shakespeare.' 

" Extract from Preface : ' It had been a thing, we 
confesse, worthie to have been wished, that the 
' author himself e had lived to have set forth and over- 
seene his own writings, but since it hath been or- 
dained otherwise, . . . we pray you do not envy his 
Friends the office of their care and paine to have 
collected and published them, absolute in their num- 
bers, as he conceived them, who as he was a happy 
imitator of nature, was a most gentle expression of 
it. His mind and hand went together, and what he 
thought he uttered, with that easiness that wee have 
scarse received from him a blot on his papers.' " In 
1656 Milton's marriage took place in the earlier 
church, of very ancient foundation. The present 
building was designed by Wren, and was begun 
in 1668, during Milton's blindness. It has a square 
tower capped by a square bell turret about ninety 
feet in height. 

The register of the church, which was preserved. 



flDUton's England 195 

records that : " The agreement and intention of 
marriage between John Milton, Esq., of the parish 
of Margaret's in Westminster, and Mrs. Katharine 
Woodcocke of Mary's in Aldermanbury, was pub- 
lished three several market days in three several 
weeks . . . and no exception being made against 
their intentions, they were according to the act of 
Parliament, married on the 12th of November, by 
Sir John Dethicke, Knight and Alderman, one of 
the Justices for the Peace in the City of London." 
A justice instead of a clergyman was prescribed by 
the Marriage Act which was then in force. 

Judge Jeffreys of bloody memory is buried in the 
church (d. 1689). 

A little west of it is Christ's Hospital, which, 
since its establishment in 1552 by the boy-king, Ed- 
ward VI., until the summer of 1902, has been one 
of the most noted of London schools. Its revenue is 
about £60,000. Its removal to Horsham in the 
country will provide the ample playgrounds and 
modern accommodations that the times demand; 
but even an American, to say nothing of native 
Londoners, must feel a pang of regret at the dis- 
appearance from the street of the bright-eyed, bare- 
headed lads, whose quaint costume has for centuries 
given their school its name of " Blue Coat School." 
Anciently the boys wore caps, but now they go bare- 
headed through the year. 



*9 6 flMltcn'3 England 

The school was originally established on the site 
of the Gray Friars Monastery, as a kind of asylum 
for poor children. Stow gives the following account 
of the opening of the institution. " In the month of 
September they took in near four hundred orphans, 
and cloathed them in Russet, but ever after they 
wore Blue Cloath Coats, whence it is commonly 
called the Blue Coat Hospital. Their habit being 
now a long coat of blue warm cloth, close to their 
arms and Body, hanging loose to their Heels, girt 
about their Waist with a red leather girdle buckled, 
a round thrum Cap tyed with a red Band, Yellow 
Stockings, and Black Low-heeled Shoes, their hair 
cut close their Locks short.'' 

" Their fare was Breakfast, bread and beer, 6.30 
summer, 7.30 winter. Sunday, beef and pottage for 
dinners. Suppers, as good legs and shoulders of 
mutton as can be bought. Tuesdays and Thurs- 
days, same dinner as Sundays. Other days, no 
flesh — Monday, milk porridge ; Wednesday, fur- 
mity ; Friday, old peas and pottage ; Saturday, water- 
gruel. Rost beef, 12 times a year. Supper, bread 
and butter or bread and cheese; Wednesday and 
Friday, pudding pies.'' 

This seems to have been a liberal table compared 
with that of the famous Winchester school in its 
early days, when two meals a day were all that 
were allowed, except for invalids. 



flMlton's Bnglanfc 197 

Stow mentions that " the King granted all 
Church Linnen formerly used in the Churches of 
London " to the hospital, as a superabundance had 
been found. Girls as well as boys were lodged and 
taught here. Stow tells us of the custom which 
prevailed from his day to ours : " One boy being 
appointed, goeth up into a pulpit there placed and 
readeth a chapter . . . and prayers. At the end of 
every prayer all the boys cry ' Amen,' that maketh 
a very melodious sound. The boy that reads is 
designed for the university. A Psalm is named by 
the same boy; and all sing with a good organ that 
is placed in the said great Hall." He describes the 
grace said by one boy in the pulpit, and the boys and 
girls quietly seating themselves while " multitudes 
of city and court " came to witness it. 

An ancient writer recounts the joy of the half- 
starved youngsters when they were first taken into 
its dining-hall and saw the baskets heaped with 
bread, and knew that there was enough for all. 
Among the buildings which are about to be replaced 
by mercantile establishments there is little, if any- 
thing, that Milton saw. Christ's Church, beside it, 
where Richard Baxter lies buried, was built by 
Wren a little after his time. 

Where so many famous men in the eighteenth and 
nineteenth centuries were to be numbered as students, 



198 flMlton's EnQlanfc 

— Coleridge, Leigh Hunt, Charles Lamb, and 
others, — the one name on its register that would 
have most interested Milton was that of William 
Camden who studied here, as well as at St. Paul's. 
A visitor from Boston, Massachusetts, is interested 
to know that in 1626, one little lad in yellow stock- 
ings and dark blue coat, who studied Latin here to 
some purpose, was Ezekiel Cheever, who became 
the master of the Boston Latin School. For thirty 
years he taught the Yankee boys in the little wooden 
house on School Street at the foot of Beacon Hill, 
and made them learn his famous " Accidence," which 
went through many editions. Often as he wandered 
over the " rocky nook with hilltops three," where 
" twice each day the flowing sea took Boston in 
its arms," his thoughts must have turned back to the 
walled city with its spires and palaces and prisons 
which he and Milton knew when they were boys. 

The London tourist, who visits London for the 
first time after 1902, will miss seeing one of its 
most fascinating sights, for he can never stand in 
the great dining-hall of Christ's Hospital on a 
Sunday noon and see the procession of pink-cheeked 
lads in their knee-breeches and long skirts come 
trooping in an orderly procession into the great 
hall, bearing great platters of steaming meats and 
baskets piled with rolls. The " Grecians " and 



flDilton's Enalanfc 199 

" Deputy-Grecians," and the less distinguished rank 
and file will never again pause here to listen to the 
Latin grace, nor will gaze at the huge canvas on 
the long wall between the galleries at either end. 
One wonders what will become of the old desks in 
the schoolroom, into which a score of generations of 
schoolboys have carved their names, and whether in 
their splendid new surroundings they will not look 
back half regretfully to the dim old cloisters which 
linked them with their great historic past. 

Old Newgate was a foul prison in Milton's day. 
Here in filthy chambers, gentlemen like Ellwood, 
Defoe, and William Penn were thrown together with 
felons. Diagonally across the street from the huge 
grim prison of later days, which since 1770 has 
stretched its length along the thoroughfare which 
bears its name, is St. Sepulchre's Church. From its 
tower the knell was struck for executions at the 
neighbouring Newgate, and many a time must the 
boys in Christ's Hospital and the Charterhouse 
School north of it have listened in horrified curiosity 
as the bell tolled, and they knew it meant that a 
man, blindfolded and with bound hands, was stand- 
ing on the scaffold in front of Newgate. St. 
Sepulchre's has been much altered since Milton 
entered it, perhaps in search of the same monument 
that first of all attracts Americans. This is the 



2oo ZlDUton's England 

monument of that bold discoverer and coloniser, 
John Smith, who settled Jamestown in Virginia the 
year before Milton was born. Who knows but 
Milton may have met him, or have gazed upon the 
dark-eyed Princess Pocahontas, who left her native 
forests and became the bride of the Englishman 
Rolfe, after she had saved the life of the gallant 
Captain Smith. 

His old tombstone is nearly defaced, and lies 
in the side aisle, some yards from its original site. 
A replica of the original inscription is placed on 
a brass tablet near it : 

" Here lyes one conquered, who hath conquered kings ; 
Subdued large territories and done things 
Which to the world impossible will seem 
But that the Truth is held in more esteem, . . . 
Or shall I tell of his adventures since, 
Done in Virginia, that large Continente ? 
How that he subdued kings unto his yoke, 
And made those Heathen flee as wind doth smoke, 
And made their land, being of so large a Station, 
An habitation for our Christian nation." . . . 

The above-mentioned " kings " were doubtless 
Indian sachems. The Anglo-Saxon satisfaction at 
the way the heathen were made to flee like smoke, 
and make room for a Christian nation, as shown by 
the writer of this effusion, indicates that the white 
Christian of Smith's day was not unlike his posterity 



flDllton's England 201 

three centuries later in the time of Cecil Rhodes and 
of Philippine campaigns. 

John Rogers, the Smithfield martyr, was vicar 
of this church. During his residence in Antwerp, 
he had made the acquaintance of Tyndale, the 
translator of the Bible, and continued Tyndale's 
work after his death. Dean Milman tells us : 
" There is no doubt that the first complete English 
Bible came from Antwerp under his superintendence 
and auspices. It bore then and still bears the name 
of Matthews's Bible. Of Matthews, however, no 
trace has ever been discovered. There is every 
reason for believing the untraceable Matthews was 
John Rogers. If so, Rogers was not only the proto- 
martyr of the English Church, but, with due respect 
for Tyndale, the protomartyr of the English Bible." 

Among the most eminent men buried at St. 
Sepulchre's was Roger Ascham, in 1568. Doubtless 
Milton, before writing his own remarkable treatise 
on education, must have studied the progressive 
theories of this man who taught Latin and Greek 
to Queen Elizabeth. 




CHAPTER XII. 

CHARTERHOUSE. ST. JOHN'S GATE. ST. BAR- 
THOLOMEW'S. SMITH FIELD 

SHEN Milton was a lad at St. Paul's School, 
it is more than likely that he sometimes 
visited the boys of Charterhouse. Let us 
imagine him on some holiday taking a stroll outside 
the city wall through Newgate, over Holborn 
Bridge, that arched the Hole Bourne or Fleet, which 
flowed southward to the Thames, at Blackfriars; 
then up Holborn Hill and to the right to Charter- 
house Square. It is still a quiet square of green 
shut in by pleasant residences, which replace the 
handsome palaces, such as Rutland House, which 
stood here during the Stuarts' reign. 

If his father accompanied the lad he may have 
recalled to him the horror of the pestilence which 
three hundred years before had swept from Asia 
across Europe. In foul, crowded London, it so 
filled the churchyards to overflowing, that in 1348, 
when thousands of bodies were flung into pits with- 
out a Christian prayer said over them, the Bishop 



I 



fllMlton's Enalanfc 203 

of London purchased three acres for a burial-ground 
upon this spot. Near here fifty thousand bodies were 
buried, one above another in deep graves. But 
three hundred years is a long time to one who has 
lived something less than ten, and perhaps these 
grisly tales of a shadowy and forgotten past appealed 
less to Milton's boyish heart than those of a nearer 
time, which his father's life had almost touched. 

Above the monastery doors which rose here after 
the Great Plague, might have been seen, only a half 
century before, the limb from the dismembered body 
of the martyred prior, who fell beneath the wrath 
of Henry VIII. He, with divers of his brethren, 
perished for their faith as nobly as John Rogers, a 
few years later, died for a different one. Heroism 
belongs to no one creed. Thus ended the monastic 
institution, the House of the Salutation of the 
Mother of God, which since 1371 had housed 
twenty-four Carthusian friars. Their quiet lives 
and austere fasts had been in sharp contrast to those 
of the Knights of St. John, their ancient neighbours, 
whose habitations perished at about the time when 
theirs arose. 

Some remains of the old monastery may be seen 
within the gates to-day, and doubtless there were 
many more reminders of it when Milton was shown 
about by his boy-friends. Perhaps the tall youth, 



2o 4 /HMlton's JEnalanfc 

Roger Williams, nine years his senior, whose later 
life was to touch his, may have noticed the handsome 
lad who read the Latin inscriptions as easily as boys 
of his age now read English, and who showed a 
marvellous comprehension of the antiquities of the 
place. 

The visitor to-day on entering the chapel, as 
Milton did, may notice at the left of the door a 
white marble tablet framed in yellow marble, on 
which an American citizen, in memory of the founder 
of Rhode Island, almost the only tolerator of all 
religious faiths in an intolerant age, has recently 
inscribed the fact that Roger Williams studied here. 

Since Milton's day the character of Charterhouse 
has not much changed, though many buildings have 
been added. The present foundation marks the 
benevolence of one of the richest merchants of 
Elizabeth's day, whose prayer was : " Lord, thou 
hast given me a large and liberal estate; give me 
also a heart to make use thereof." In 161 1, Thomas 
Sutton purchased the Charterhouse for £13.000, 
from the Earl of Suffolk and his relatives, and made 
over twenty manors and lordships and other rich 
estates, including the Charterhouse, in trust for 
the hospital. 

The pensioners were originally eighty in number, 
and the boys, forty-four. Hubert Herkomer's well- 



/IDiiton'B JEnQlanfc 205 

known, beautiful painting in the Tate Gallery of the 
Charterhouse chapel and the venerable figures of 
the aged gentlemen who daily worship here in their 
quaint gowns, depicts a scene that Milton saw, and 
that the modern visitor may see to-day. Beyond the 
huge, pretentious monument of Sutton, that fills one 
corner of the chapel, is the side room, where, until 
quite recent years, the boys sat at morning service. 
Now their numbers are increased, and they are more 
happily housed out in the country, where outdoor 
sports and rural life can do more for them than 
this region, which is now hemmed in by the en- 
croachments of commercial London. Stow tells 
us that the master was required to be twenty-seven 
years old, and that the highest form must every 
Sunday set up in the Great Hall four Greek and 
four Latin verses, " each to be made on any part 
of the second Lesson for that day." 

One cannot but feel that the old gentlemen must 
sadly miss their sprightly young comrades, and long 
for the sound of their merry shouts and whistles. 
Their numbers are falling off, for the revenues, 
drawn from agricultural sources, are diminishing. 
To-day about fifty-five are entered. All must be 
over sixty years of age. They have all the freedom 
of private citizens, except that they are expected to 
dine together in the great panelled dining-hall, and 



2o6 fllMlton's JEnglanfc 

at night to be in by eleven o'clock. Each pensioner 
has a bedroom and sitting-room, and a loaf and 
butter is brought him for his breakfast. About £30 
a year are allowed each for clothing and other 
food, and a female attendant is assigned to each 
half dozen gentlemen. Thackeray's description of 
Founder's Day is most touching, and deserves to 
be read by all who visit Charterhouse, where he 
studied, and in imagination saw the last days of 
Colonel Newcome : 

" The custom of the school is on the 12th of 
December, the Founder's Day, that the head gown- 
boy shall recite a Latin oration, in praise of our 
founder and upon other subjects, and a goodly com- 
pany of old Cistercians is generally brought together 
to attend this oration, after which we go to chapel 
and have a sermon, after which we go to a great 
dinner, where old condisciples meet, old toasts are 
given, and speeches made. Before marching from 
the oration hall to chapel, the stewards of the day's 
dinner, according to the old-fashioned rite, have 
wands in their hands, walk to church at the head 
of the procession, and sit in places of honour. The 
boys are already on their seats with smug fresh 
faces and shining white collars; the old black- 
gowned pensioners are on their benches, the chapel 
is lighted, the founder's tomb, with its grotesque 



flDUton's Enalanfc 2*7 

carvings, monsters, heraldries, darkles and shines 
with the most wonderful lights and shadows. 
There he sits, Fundator Noster, in his ruff and 
gown, awaiting the Great Examination Day. We 
oldsters, be we ever so old, become boys again as 
we look at that familiar old tomb, and think how the 
seats were altered since we were here, and how the 
doctor used to sit yonder and his awful eye used to 
frighten us shuddering boys on whom it lighted ; 
and how the boy next us would kick our shins 
during the service time, and how the monitor would 
cane us afterward because our shins were kicked. 
Yonder sit forty cherry-cheeked boys, thinking 
about home and holida) r s to-morrow. Yonder sit 
some three-score old gentlemen — pensioners of the 
hospital, listening to the prayers and psalms. You 
hear them coughing feebly in the twilight — the 
old, reverend black gowns. ... A plenty of candles 
light up this chapel, and this scene of youth and age 
and early memories and pompous death. How 
solemn the well-remembered prayers are here uttered 
again in the place where in childhood w r e used to 
hear them! How beautiful and decorous the rite! 
How noble the ancient words of the supplications 
which the priest utters, and to which generations of 
bygone seniors have cried, ' Amen,' under those 
arches." 



2o8 /HMlton's Bnglanfc 

We pass up, as Milton may have done, the broad 
carved oak staircase of the period antedating Sut- 
ton's purchase, when Lord North welcomed the 
Princess Elizabeth as his guest and entertained 
her royally, five days before her coronation. In 
these spacious rooms, with deep-set windows, and 
richly decorated ceilings, the cautious princess held 
meetings daily with her councillors. The lofty fire- 
place and the tapestry hangings that remain recall 
in their dim splendour days when lords and dukes 
and maids of honour waited in trepidation upon the 
behest of the haughty woman who was soon to 
become their dread sovereign. It was in one of 
these rooms that the pupil orator gave his oration 
upon Founder's Day. 

One of the rooms not always shown to visitors 
should not be missed. It is the long, cosy library of 
the pensioners. Here, leaning out of the diamond- 
paned windows upon a summer's day, or grouping 
themselves in easy chairs about the blazing hearth 
in gray November, one loves to think of these lonely 
gentlemen, who have seen better days, spending their 
last, quiet years among their books. 

The visitor to the Charterhouse will not fail 
to spend a half day within the vicinity. In spite 
of its sordid and commercial aspect, it possesses 
many of the most precious relics of the past. 




a £ 



/HMlton's lEnolat^ 209 

A little to the northwest of Smithfield, where 
it spans a narrow and somewhat squalid street, 
stands the huge stone gateway of St. John's. Noth- 
ing in its vicinity reveals the fact that once beside it 
stood a conventual church, and a bell-tower that 
was one of the glories of London, and nothing to 
indicate that, centuries before these, one of the 
richest and most famous of all the monastic estab- 
lishments around London was built here. The 
history of the Knights of St. John is one of the 
longest and most romantic of mediaeval histories. 
The prototype of their ancient hospital was in Jeru- 
salem, where the knights of the order lived lives of 
abstinence and charity. The English establishment in 
Clerkenwell was founded in 1100 A. D., only a gen- 
eration after the coming of the Norman Conqueror. 
This was the time of Godfrey of Bouillon and of the 
first Crusade. Forty years later the monks in Jeru- 
salem became a military order, and thenceforth their 
history is one that seemed guided by Joshua 
rather than the Prince of Peace. Large gifts and 
power led them soon far from the simple habits 
of their early days. Of their fights with pirates 
and with Turks and with rival Christian bodies, there 
is no space to tell. Like the Christian Church itself, 
in many periods, they waxed fat and gross, and 
became the hated " plutocrats " of the working men 



2io flMlton's Enolanfc 

of their time. In that sweet story, written in Saxon 
English, by William Morris, of the monk, " John 
Ball," we have a picture of the brave men of Kent 
who rose in wrath to destroy, as did the Paris mob 
of 1793, the men who long had mocked at 
their impotence and fed upon their toil. The 
rebels marched with spear and bow to London, 
and wreaked their vengeance on many, but 
especially those whose travesty on the teaching 
of the saint whose name they bore had maddened 
them to fury. They burnt all the houses belonging 
to St. John's, and set on fire the beautiful priory, 
which burned seven days. King Richard II., safe in 
the Tower, in vain besought his Council for advice 
in this extremity. The prior himself did not escape, 
but fell beneath the relentless axe of the men of 
Kent, as thousands for a like cause fell under the 
guillotine in Paris. 

The present gateway was not erected until the 
following century. In the reign of Edward VI., the 
church with the " graven gilt and enamelled bell- 
tower " was undermined and blown up with gun- 
powder, and the stone was used for building the 
Lord Protector's House upon the Strand. To-day 
the members of the revived English League of the 
Order of St. John hold their meetings in the gate. 

With the exception of Westminster Abbey, prob- 



flDtlton'3 England 211 

ably no church has more of interest than St. Bar- 
tholomew's at Smithfield. Within the century that 
saw the White Tower of the Conqueror begun, a 
monastery and church rose on this site. "A pleas- 
ant-witted gentleman, who was therefore called ' the 
king's minstrel,' " as Stow relates, was blest with a 
most singular vision on his pilgrimage to Rome. 
Like Saul of Tarsus, he felt the Lord's command 
to leave his old life and begin anew. Accordingly 
on his return to England he established a priory for 
thirteen monks, and in 1123 built the Norman 
church, part of which stands practically as he left it. 
Says a nineteenth-century antiquary : " Except the 
Tower and its immediate neighbourhood, there is no 
part of London, old or new, around which are clus- 
tered so many events interesting in history, as that 
of the priory of St. Bartholomew-the-Great and its 
vicinity. There are narrow, tortuous streets, and 
still narrower courts, about Cloth Fair, where are 
hidden away scores of old houses, whose projecting 
eaves and overhanging floors, heavy, cumbrous 
beams and wattle and plaster walls must have seen 
the days of the Plantagenets. There are remains 
of groined arches, and windows with ancient tracery, 
strong buttresses, and beautiful portals, with toothed 
and ornate archways, belonging to times long 
anterior to Wyclif and John of Gaunt yet to be 



2i2 /HMlton's England 

found lurking behind dark, uncanny-looking tene- 
ments. . . . When Chaucer was young, and his 
Canterbury Pilgrims were men and women of the 
period, processions of cowled monks and chanting 
boys, with censers and crucifix, wended their way 
from the old priory of the Black Friars beside the 
Thames; and when Edward III. had spent the 
morning in witnessing the tourney of mailed knights 
at Smithfield, have they and their attendants, with 
all the pomp and pageantry of chhalry, passed 
beneath this old gateway to the grand entertainment 
of the good prior in the great refectory beyond the 
south cloisters. ... As we go round the Great 
Close we pass by some very old houses that occupy 
the place where was once the east cloisters. Behind 
these houses used to be a great mulberry-tree, only 
removed in our own time." 

Here may Milton, during those dark days of the 
Restoration, when he retired to the seclusion of 
these narrow streets to escape observation, have 
sometimes ventured. Here sitting on the stone 
seat beneath its shade, he may have seen in fancy 
the processions of sandalled monks, with rosaries 
dangling against their long gray robes, move 
silently by as in the olden time, and pass within 
the portals of the church. And stepping beneath 
its round arches, he may himself have stood, as 







CHURCH OF ST. BARTHOLOMEW THE GREAT 

From an old engraving. 



/lDtlton's England 213 

countless monks and pilgrims before him have done, 
before the recumbent painted figure of the tonsured 
monk, Rahere, who lies under a beautifully wrought 
Gothic canopy of a much later period. Around him 
rise the solemn, massive pillars with their cubiform 
capitals, which seem scarcely less fresh and solid 
than when Rahere gazed on them with pride. Here 
are to be seen the slight intimations, even amid 
Norman semicircular arches, of the Gothic pointed 
arch that was to supersede them in the near future. 
Of the four superb arches which once supported the 
great central tower, two are the half-circle and two 
are slightly pointed. 

An interesting and lovely feature of the church is 
the oriel window by the triforium, opposite Rahere's 
grave, built by the famous Prior Bolton. Here the 
prior seems to have had a kind of pew or seat from 
whence he could overlook the canons when he 
pleased, without their being aware of his presence, 
as it communicated with his house. The aisles 
form a fine study for the architect. The horseshoe 
Moorish arch is much used, as well as the simpler 
Norman arch, and there is seen a regular gradation 
from one to the other. 

Among the tombs that must have most interested 
Puritan Milton was one of James Rivers, who died 
in 1 641 just as the civil war was about to break 



214 flDUton'5 J£nglan5 

forth, who evidently, had he lived, would have 
thrown in his lot where Milton did. His epitaph 
contains the lines : 

" Whose life and death designed no other end, 
Than to serve God, his country, and his friend ; 
Who, when ambition, tyranny, and pride 
Conquered the age, conquered himself and died." 

A tomb that may have interested Milton is that of 
Sir Walter Mildmay, the founder of Emmanuel 
College, Cambridge, which sent so many Puritans 
to the new colonies in Massachusetts. It was this 
Mildmay to whom, when he came to court, Queen 
Elizabeth said : " I hear, Sir Walter, that you have 
erected a Puritan foundation." " No, madam," was 
the answer, " but I have set an acorn, which when 
it becomes an oak, God knows what will be the 
fruit thereof." 

In Milton's time many Puritans lived in the par- 
ish, and a manuscript book preserved in the vestry 
records that there was " Collected for the children 
of New England uppon 2 Sabath daies following in 
february, 1643, ^ 2 > 8- 9-" This was a goodly sum 
for those days, and was doubtless much appreciated 
by the English cousins, who in their bare pine 
meeting-houses beside the tidal Charles remem- 
bered that the Puritans who remained at home 



flDUton's England 215 

were called to wage a fiercer fight with priestcraft, 
prerogative, and privilege than they, with poverty. 

The church to-day is but a fraction of its former 
size, in fact, hardly more than the choir of the noble 
building which Rahere erected. The entire length 
of the church as it left his hand is supposed to have 
been 225 feet. In 1539 Sir Richard Rich bought 
church and priory for little more than £1,000, and 
the thirteen evicted canons were pensioned off. 

Close by old St. Bartholomew's is Smithfield, so 
near that, in the reign of the Tudors, the ruddy light 
of martyrs' fagots must have cast a glow upon its 
roof and its walls must have resounded to the 
screams of sufferers in their last agonising moments. 

On the south side of Smithfield, in Milton's day, 
rose St. Bartholomew's Hospital, founded by Henry 
VIII., upon the site of Rahere's earlier one. The 
great Harvey, the physician of Charles I., who dis- 
covered the circulation of the blood, was physician 
to this hospital for thirty-four years, and here, in 
1619, he lectured on his great discovery. The pres- 
ent structure dates from a period early in the eight- 
eenth century. 

Directly opposite St. Bartholomew's Church, in 
1849, excavations three feet below the surface ex- 
posed to view a mass of unhewn stones, blackened as 
by fire, and covered with ashes and human bones, 



2i6 flMlton's England 

charred and partially consumed. This marked the 
spot where martyrs, facing eastward toward the 
great gate of St. Bartholomew's, were chained to 
the stake. The prior was generally present on such 
occasions. An old print of the burning of Anne 
Askew displays a pulpit erected for the sermon, 
and raised seats for the numerous spectators who 
came to view the spectacle with probably no more 
shrinking than the Ixmdoners of the early nine- 
teenth century viewed the hangings at Newgate. 

Of the two hundred and seventy-seven persons 
who in Mary's reign here perished for their faith, 
none is more lovingly remembered in Old England 
or in New England than John Rogers, the first 
martyr in the Marian persecution, to whom we have 
already referred. For a century or more, Calvinistic 
New England taught its children from that quaint 
little book known as the "New England Primer," and 
now treasured in many families as a curiosity. No 
one among its wretched little woodcuts struck such 
a solemn awe into the child's mind, — making the 
courage of the soldier on the battle-field shrink to 
nothing in comparison, as that picture where John 
Rogers, surrounded by his wife and nine children 
and another at the breast, testified to his faith within 
the flames. " That which I have preached I will 
seal with my blood," said the indomitable man, 



flMlton's Bnolanfc * 217 

when offered pardon for recantation. " I will never 
pray for thee," quoth his angry questioner. " But 
I will pray for you," said Master Rogers. History 
does not record that his little children saw their 
father die, but only that they met him on the way, 
and sobbed out their farewells. But enough; we 
need not enter on the hideous story of this spot in 
the generation that followed this martyr. 

In early days, Smithfield, or Smoothfield, was the 
Campus Martius for sham fights and tilts. All sorts 
of sports, archery, and bowls, and ball games were 
played here, and it was a resort for acrobats and jug- 
glers. In 1615, says Howes, " The City of London 
reduced the rude, vast place of Smithfield into a 
faire and comely order, which formerly was never 
held possible to be done, and paved it all over, and 
made divers sewers to convey the water from the 
new channels which were made by reason of the new 
pavement; they also made strong rails round about 
Smithfield, and sequestered the middle part into 
a very fair and civil walk, and railed it round about 
with strong rails, to defend the place from annoy- 
ance and danger, as well from carts, as all manner 
of cattle, because it was intended hereafter that in 
time it might prove a fair and peaceable market- 
place, by reason that Newgate Market, Moorgate, 
Cheapside, Leadenhall, and Gracechurch Street, 



2i8 flMlton's England 

were immeasurably pestered with the unimaginable 
increase and multiplicity of market folks. And this 
field, commonly called West Smithfield, was for 
many years called Ruffian's Hall, by reason it was 
the usual place of frays and common fighting dur- 
ing the time that sword and bucklers were in use. 
But the ensuing deadly fight with rapier and dagger 
suddenly suppressed the fighting with sword and 
buckler." In his " Henry IV.," Shakespeare makes 
Page say of Bardolph : " He's gone to Smithfield to 
buy your worship a horse." To which Falstaff 
replies : " I bought him in Paul's, and he'll buy me 
a horse in Smithfield ; an I could get me but a 
wife in the stews, I were manned, horsed, and 
wived." 

Ben Jonson's merry play, " Bartholomew Fair." 
written in 1613, gives a good account of the babel 
of entreaties and advertising boasts that assailed 
the ears of the unwary customer : " Will your wor- 
ship buy any gingerbread, gilt gingerbread; very 
good bread, comfortable bread? Buy any ballads? 
New ballads ! Hey ! 

" Now the fair's a filling ! 
O, for a tune to startle 
The birds of the booths here billing- 
Yearly with old St. Bartle. 



/IMlton's England 219 

" Buy any pears, pears, very fine pears ! What 
do you lack, gentleman? Maid, see a fine hoppy- 
horse for your young master. Cost you but a 
farthing a week for his provender. 

" Buy a mouse-trap, a mouse-trap, or a tormentor 
for a flea ? 

" What do you lack ? fine purses, pouches, pin- 
cases, pipes? a pair of smiths to wake you in the 
morning, or a fine whistling bird? 

" Gentlewomen, the weather's hot; whither walk 
you? Have a care of your fine velvet caps; the 
fair is dusty. Take a sweet delicate booth with 
boughs, here in the way, and cool yourself in the 
shade, you and your friends. Here be the best 
pigs. A delicate show-pig, little mistress, with 
sweet sauce and crackling, like de bay-leaf i' de 
fire, la! T'ou shalt ha' the clean side o' the table- 
clot' and de glass vashed ! " 

From all which, and much more to the same pur- 
port, one may judge that whether in Ben Jonson's 
time or Browning's, whether in Smithfield or in 
the modern charity fair, the art of alluring or 
browbeating the man with a purse into buying what 
he does not want is much the same. Long after 
Milton's death, the fair was famous, and drew 
gaping throngs to witness mountebanks swing in 
mid air, and to view the fat woman and double- 



220 /HMlton's Enolanfc 

headed calf, for all the world like " The Greatest 
Moral Show on Earth " to-day. 

Now Smithfield has banished mountebanks and 
bellowing herds. Only the carcases of the latter 
may be found in the huge brick market that covers 
a large part of the once open space. The original 
size of Smithfield was but three acres, but since 
1834 it has been over six acres in extent. 




CHAPTER XIII. 

ELY PLACE. INNS OF COURT. TEMPLE CHURCH. 

COVENT GARDEN. SOMERSET HOUSE 

MOLBORN was paved long before Milton's 
m, birth, and was a street of consequence, 
because of the Inns of Court, which 
opened north and south from it. From his time 
until 1868 a row of small houses southward from 
Gray's Inn blocked up the street, and became even 
in his day " a mighty hindrance to Holborn in point 
of prospect." 

Ely Place, off Holborn, is little known to hasty 
tourists who have not time to leave the beaten track 
of sightseeing. But any one who has a quiet hour 
to spend in the exquisite little church of St. Ethel- 
dreda, and to recall the glories of the past which its 
Gothic walls have witnessed, will be well repaid. 

Ely Place, a rectangle of dull, commonplace 
houses, at its entrance gives no glimpse of the 
chapel, which is shrinkingly withdrawn a little 
among the interloping walls that now replace the gar- 
dens and the palaces of Milton's day. In Chaucer's 



222 /IDilton's JEnglanfc 

lifetime, the Bishop of Ely built this very chapel to 
the Saxon saint, the daughter of the king of the 
West Angles, who was born about the year 630. 
She took part in the erection of the Cathedral of 
Ely amid the morasses of the " Fen " country, and 
was chosen as its patron saint. In 679 she died, 
the abbess of the convent of Ely. Singularly 
enough, this modest lady gave the origin to the 
word " tawdry," so Thornbury declares. For her 
name was sometimes called St. Audry, and some 
cheap necklaces sold at St. Audry's fair at Ely were 
known as " tawdry " laces, whence the name was 
applied to other cheap and showy ornaments. 

After long continuance in the hands of Protes- 
tants, the church has again reverted to the faith of 
those who built it. It is the only instance of a 
" living " crypt in London, i. e., one in which tapers 
burn and kneeling worshippers assemble before 
shrines. On any week day, one may in three 
minutes turn from Holborn into its mediaeval quiet 
and seclusion and tell one's beads, either in the upper 
or lower sanctuary, or gaze at the glorious decorated 
east window, and on the chaste proportions of an 
unspoiled Gothic structure. Its wealth of windows 
remotely reminds one of the Sainte Chapelle of 
good King Louis, whose jewelled windows in their 
slender lofty frames are one of the marvels of the 
island in the Seine. 



flMlton's Enalanfc 223 

In the Plantagenet and Tudor period, vineyards, 
kitchen garden, and orchard surrounded the mag- 
nificent buildings of Ely Place. Hither, at the Duke 
of Gloucester's bidding, as Shakespeare, following 
history, records, the bishop sent hastily for the 
strawberries for which his garden was ' famous. 

" My Lord of Ely, when I was last in Holborn 
I saw good strawberries in your garden there ; 
I do beseech you send for some of them." 

In the reign of Elizabeth, Sir Christopher Hatton 
was the owner of Ely Place. Except a cluster of 
houses, — Ely Rents, — standing on Holborn, the 
land round about this great estate seems to have 
been unbuilt upon. 

Sir Christopher, who rose to be Elizabeth's lord 
chancellor, was a striking looking man and a 
graceful dancer. He captivated the queen, who 
was very susceptible to manly beauty. The state 
papers in the Record Office, it is said, disclose her 
fond and foolish correspondence with him. In 
Milton's lifetime, Lady Hatton — a gay and wealthy 
widow — was wooed and won by the famous Sir 
Edward Coke. But Hatton House saw many an 
open quarrel between the ill-matched pair. 

In the time of Charles I., a pageant almost unpar- 
alleled in magnificence was arranged in Ely Place. 



224 /HMlton's Enolatto 

The redoubtable Prynne, who had preached against 
all such frivolities in the customary strong language 
of the time, had not yet lost his ears, as he did 
later, in the pillory. But his strictures had given 
offence at the court of Queen Henrietta Maria, who 
was minded to amuse herself with masques ; con- 
sequently this famous masque came off. Mr. Lawes. 
the famous musician and friend of Milton, was set 
to composing music for the occasion. On an even- 
ing in 1633, when Milton was living at Horton, the 
magnificent procession wended its way through 
crowds of enthusiastic spectators toward White- 
hall. One hundred gentlemen on the best horses 
that the stables of royalty and the nobility could 
offer, all clad in gold and silver, and each accom- 
panied by a page and two lackeys carrying torches, 
were only one feature of the pageant ; the others 
were some of them as odd as these were splendid. 
Tiny children, dressed like birds, rode on small 
horses; every beautiful or fantastic conceit imagin- 
able was carried out, and the cost of the whole was 
no less than £21,000, a sum which meant far more 
in purchasing power than it does to-day. Some of 
the musicians, however, received f 100 apiece — a fee 
quite satisfactory to many a prima donna in our 
time. 

No more characteristic part of Milton's London 



/HMlton's JEnglanO 225 

exists to-day than the various Inns of Court that 
lead north and south from Holborn. As the sight- 
seer passes from the jostle and turmoil of the 
Thoroughfare, he is transported in a moment into 
a silence and seclusion that remind one of a Puritan 
Sabbath. Quadrangle opens out of quadrangle, 
shut in by rows of unpretentious buildings, whose 
monotony is broken by Gothic chapels or Tudor 
dining-halls surmounted by carved cupolas. Oc- 
casionally a cloistered walk under low Tudor arches, 
or a group of highly ornate terra cotta chimneys 
is seen, as one wanders around the dim and 
shadowy passages. All at once a turn, and behold, 
here in the heart of the life of this six million 
people of the great overgrown metropolis, still 
stretch long reaches of greensward, locked safely 
from the intrusion of the public by their handsome 
wrought-iron gates. 

In Gray's Inn, to the north of Holborn, Francis 
Bacon wrote his " Novum Organum," which he 
published in 1620, when Milton was a schoolboy at 
St. Paul's, and when the Leyden Pilgrims in the 
Mayflower landed on Plymouth Rock. 

The gardens of Gray's Inn, which Bacon set 
out with trees, became a fashionable promenade in 
Milton's old age. Pepys tells us that he took his 
wife there after church one Sunday, " to observe 



226 flDUton's England 

the fashions of the ladies, because of my wife's 
making some clothes." It was, in short, quite as 
much a dress parade as Fifth Avenue on Easter 
Sunday in New York. 

Lord Burleigh, Elizabeth's great minister, was, 
next to Bacon, the most eminent of the members of 
Gray's Inn. 

Its hall, which dates from 1560, is little inferior 
to any hall in all the Inns of Court. It has carved 
wainscoting, and a timber roof, and windows 
emblazoned with the arms of Lord Bacon and Lord 
Burleigh. In Milton's time, Gray's Inn marked the 
northern limit of the town, and all beyond it was 
green fields and country lanes. Therefore we now 
turn south and west to explore briefly the numerous 
other inns that must often have echoed to the steps 
of Milton when he lived almost within stone's 
throw of them. 

Dickens's description of the little Staple Inn gives 
the reader an exact impression of the place to- 
day : " Behind the most ancient part of Holborn, 
where certain gabled houses some centuries of age 
still stand looking on the public way, as if disconso- 
lately looking for the Old Bourne that has long since 
run dry, is a little nook composed of two irregular 
quadrangles, called Staple Inn. It is one of those 
nooks, the turning into which, out of the clashing 



flDUton's Englanfc 227 

street, imparts to the relieved pedestrian the sensation 
of having put cotton in his ears and velvet soles on 
his boots. It is one of those nooks where a few 
smoky sparrows twitter on smoky trees, as though 
they called to each other, ' Let us play at country,' 
and where a few feet of garden mould and a few 
yards of gravel enable them to do that refreshing 
violence to their tiny understandings. Moreover, 
it is one of those nooks that are legal nooks; 
and it contains a little hall with a little lantern in its 
roof." 

Walking through the further quadrangle, and 
following the narrow street down past the towering, 
vulgar conglomeration of every incongruous archi- 
tectural device, — the new Birkbeck Bank, — we 
enter presently the wide spaces of Lincoln's Inn. 

The style of buildings, whether new or old, is 
largely Tudor of the type of Hampton Court. The 
walls of red brick are inlaid with diagonal lines of 
darker bricks. The chapel, of Perpendicular Gothic, 
built by Inigo Jones, is raised on arches which leave 
a kind of open crypt below, where Pepys tells us 
he used to walk. The stained glass windows ante- 
date Laud's time, and Laud is said to have wondered 
that the saints emblazoned on them escaped the 
" furious spirit " that was aroused against those 
" harmless, goodly windows " of his at Lambeth. 



228 /HMlton's England 

At number 24 of the " Old Buildings," the secre- 
tary of Oliver Cromwell lived from 1645 t0 ^59, 
where his correspondence was discovered behind a 
false ceiling. The tradition that the Protector was 
overheard to discuss with him here about the kid- 
napping of the three little sons of Charles I. may 
be dismissed as mythical. 

Beside the noble brick gateway of Lincoln's Inn, 
which bore the date 15 18, it is said that rare Ben 
Jonson, in his early days of poverty, was found 
working with a trowel in one hand and his Horace 
in the other, when some gentlemen, having com- 
passion on him, as did Cimabue on the gifted child, 
Giotto, rescued him, and let loose the imprisoned 
genius who found Shakespeare for a friend, and 
the Abbey for his tomb. 

Of Furnivall's, Scroope's, and Barnard's Inns, 
and Thavie's, oldest of them all, we have no space to 
write. The characteristics of the four great inns 
are stated in the lines : 

" Gray's Inn for walks, Lincoln's Inn for wall, 
The Inner Temple for a garden, 
And the Middle for a hall." 

The modern sightseer finds, as probably Milton 
found, much more of interest in the two latter, which 
lie south of Fleet Street, than in all the others 
combined. 



riDtlton's England 229 

Before crossing Fleet Street, mention should be 
made of Temple Bar, which was erected by Wren 
four years before Milton's death, and marked the 
transition from Fleet Street to the Strand. The 
" Old Cheshire Cheese ; ' in the ancient and dingy 
Wine Office Court, which opens north from Fleet 
Street, probably was built a dozen years before 
Milton died. It was Doctor Johnson's restaurant, 
and his fame brings many customers to sit in his 
old seat, which is still carefully preserved. 

Between the Tower and Westminster stands 
half-way one little edifice more ancient than any 
other on that route. It is the little Temple Church 
of Norman and transitional design, which stands 
secluded from the traffic of the streets within a 
stone's throw of Temple Bar. 

Of its dimensions and manifold restorations, the 
ordinary guide-books say enough, and make a repe- 
tition unnecessary. The round church with its 
interesting arcade of grotesque, sculptured heads, 
and its rare proportions ; the choir, " springing," 
as Hawthorne says, " as it were, in a harmonious 
and accordant fountain out of the clustered pillars 
that support its pinioned arches," are both a delight 
to every lover of the beautiful. 

Hardly more than a century after the Norman 
conquest we find the Knights Templars on this spot. 



23° flDilton's England 

The year after their removal here from Holborn 
in 1 185, they built their Temple church, the finest 
of the four round churches that still remain in 
England. The choir, which is one of the most 
beautiful specimens of pure early English, was fin- 
ished in 1240. 

In early times, the discipline of the knights was 
most severe. The Master himself scourged dis- 
obedient brethren within its walls, and on Fridays 
there were frequent public whippings within the 
church. In a narrow, penitential cell to be seen 
in the church walls, only four and a half feet long 
and two and a half wide, a disobedient brother is 
said to have been starved to death. 

The interesting recumbent figures clad in mail, 
upon the Temple floor, are not, as is popularly sup- 
posed, Knights Templars, but Associates of the 
Temple, who were only partly admitted to its great 
privileges. 

Shortly after the downfall of the Templars, the 
property passed into the hands of the Knights of St. 
John of Jerusalem, whose priory, as we remember, 
was burned by the wrathful men of Kent in Wat 
Tyler's rebellion. The knights leased it to the law 
students who belonged to the " King's Court." 
Therefore, when the rebels reached London, they 
poured down on the haunts of the Temple lawyers, 



rtDilton's BtiGlanD 231 

carried off the books, deeds, and rolls of remem- 
brance, and, in vengeance on the Knights Hospi- 
tallers, burned them in Fleet Street. So determined 
were these men, goaded by years of tyranny, to put 
an end to all the laws that had oppressed them. 

In later years, we find that the Temple church 
in the time of Henry VIII., and later still, of 
Milton and Ben Jonson, was used in term time 
for the students as a place for rendezvous. Dis- 
cussions on legal questions sometimes waxed bois- 
terous, and, as a contemporary said, as " noisy as 
St. Paul's." 

In Elizabeth's day the Middle Temple abandoned 
the old Templar arms — a red cross on a silver 
shield with a lamb bearing the sacred banner sur- 
mounted by a red cross — and substituted a flying 
Pegasus. Both of these emblems meet the visitor's 
eye as he winds through the labyrinthine passages 
of the old quadrangles, and comes at every step 
upon some spot rich with the associations of cen- 
turies. 

Of the well-known story of the origin of the 
Wars of the Roses within the Temple Gardens it 
is not necessary here to speak. 

An old print of Milton's later years shows the 
gardens of the Inner Temple laid out in many 
straight rows of trees, like apple-trees in orchards, 



232 flMlton'g England 

which extended down to the wall that bordered 
the Thames. North, toward Fleet Street, rows 
upon rows of gabled houses, four stories in height, 
enclosed quadrangles and courts. The dining-halls, 
built in the Tudor period, stand as they stood when 
Spenser, in the generation before Milton, wrote of — 

" those bricky towers, 
The which on Thames' broad back do ride, 
Where now the studious lawyers have their bowers ; 
There whilom wont the Temple knights to bide 
Till they decayed through pride." 

The little Fountain in Fountain Court is dear 
to lovers of Dickens, for here Ruth Pinch tripped 
by with merry heart to meet her lover. In Queen 
Anne's time, a fountain of much loftier altitude 
sparkled and splashed here, and for aught we know 
made music when Milton and Shakespeare wan- 
dered within the Temple precincts. 

It was not until after Milton's birth that James 
I. in 1609 granted the whole property to the two 
societies of the Inner and Middle Temples; where- 
upon they presented his Majesty with a precious 
gold cup of great weight, which cup was esteemed 
by the monarch as one of his most valued treasures. 
When the king's daughter Elizabeth was married 
four years later, the Temple and Gray's Inn men 
gave a masque, which Sir Francis Bacon planned 



flMlton's BnglanD 233 

and executed. The bridal party came by water and 
landed at the foot of the Temple Gardens amid peals 
of the little cannon of that day, and with great pomp 
and merriment. The king gave a supper to the forty 
masquers. This masque, however, did not compare 
in splendour with the one given twenty years later, 
and already alluded to, which was planned by 
members of the Inns of Court meeting in Ely Place. 
In Milton's middle life the learned Selden, who 
died in 1654, was buried in the choir of the Temple 
church. Of him Milton writes that he is " one of 
your own now sitting in Parliament, the chief of 
learned men reputed in this land." When Milton 
was in his thirty-sixth year and had published his 
treatise on divorce, he writes of Selden, then in 
his sixtieth year, whose acquaintance he had proba- 
bly made, and begged those who would know the 
truth to "hasten to be acquainted with that noble 
volume written by our learned Selden, of ' The Law 
of Nature and of Nations,' a work more useful and 
more worthy to be perused, whoever studies to be 
a great man in wisdom, equity, and justice, than 
all those decretals . . . which the pontifical clerks 
have doted on." Of his well-known " Table Talk," 
Coleridge observes : " There is more weighty 
bullion sense in this book than I ever found in the 
same number of pages of any uninspired writer." 



234 /IDilton's Bnolanfc 

One of the greatest names connected with the 
Temple is that of Richard Hooker, author of the 
famous " Ecclesiastical Polity." He was for six 
years Master of the Temple — a position which 
Izaak Walton, who wrote his life, says he accepted 
rather than desired. The interest in music in the 
seventeenth century is evinced by the fierce contest 
which lasted for a year, as to the organ which should 
be erected in this church. Two organs were put up 
by rivals. The great Purcell performed on one 
which was finally selected by Judge Jeffreys of the 
Inner Temple. He was a capital musician, and 
in his case at least the adage seemed disproved that 
" Music hath charms to soothe the savage breast." 

With the Restoration and the opening of the 
floodgates of luxury and licentiousness, which the 
stern Puritan had for twenty years kept in abey- 
ance, the Temple renewed the banquets and merry- 
makings of an earlier day. At a continuous banquet 
which lasted half a month, the Earl of Nottingham 
kept open house to all London, and entertained all 
the great and powerful of the time. Fifty servants 
waited on Charles II. and his company, while twenty 
violins made merry music at the feast. 

The Great Fire of 1666 ceased ere it reached the 
Temple church, but it was not stopped until many 
sets of chambers and title-deeds of a vast number 



/BMlton's Enalanfc) 235 

of valuable estates had perished. Another fire only 
a dozen years later destroyed much more of the 
establishment which Milton knew. Of the Inner 
Temple Hall little exists to-day that his eyes rested 
on. But the stately Middle Temple Hall, built in 
1572, still stands, and is one of the best specimens 
of Elizabethan architecture that London boasts. 
The open roof of hammer-beam design, with pen- 
dants, is especially characteristic of the work of that 
period. The screen is an elaborate one of Renais- 
sance work, more interesting for its age and asso- 
ciations than for its conformity to true principles of 
art. This famous hall witnessed the performance 
of Shakespeare's "Twelfth Night" in 1601. The 
same strong, oak tables of the days of Bacon, Coke, 
and Jonson still stretch from end to end. Viewed 
from the western dais, the portraits, armour, and 
rich windows combine with the massive furniture 
and carved screen to present a scene of sober rich- 
ness hardly equalled outside of a few dining-halls 
of Oxford and Cambridge which belong to that 
same period. Among the eminent men of the 
Middle Temple whose lives Milton's life touched 
were Sir Walter Raleigh, John Pym, Ireton, — 
Cromwell's son-in-law, — Evelyn, Lord Chancellor 
Clarendon, and many others of equal note in their 
day. 



236 flDtlton's EnglanD 

Only one who has delved long in the biography 
and literature of this great age can realise the 
stupendous scholarship of the men of this period, — 
Coke, Selden, Bacon, Newton, Milton, and their 
contemporaries across the Channel, Grotius, Spinoza, 
and Galileo, — who, with the men of action of 
their day, make the century in which they lived one 
of the most significant since time began. What 
period since the Golden Age of Greece can match 
their achievements ? Where on earth since the days 
of Periclean eloquence and wisdom in Athens could 
be found one spot where so much genius and learn- 
ing had its centre as in the England into which 
Milton was born, and in which he lived for two- 
thirds of a century? 

" We are apt," says Lowell, " to wonder at the 
scholarship of the men of three centuries ago and at 
a certain dignity of phrase that characterises them. 
They were scholars because they did not read so 
many things as we. They had fewer books, but 
those were of the best. Their speech was noble, be- 
cause they lunched with Plutarch and supped with 
Plato." Of the long list of eminent men who 
studied here in the century after Milton, perhaps 
none was more akin to him in scholarship than the 
learned Blackstone; none who more deeply under- 
stood his Puritan seriousness than Cowper; none 



/JBflton's Bnglanfc 237 

who in boldness, love of liberty, and justice more 
resembled him than Edmund Burke. 

Fifty years before Milton's birth, as Aggas's old 
map of 1562 gives evidence, London had extended 
but a little way beyond the city walls and the Strand. 
But in Elizabeth's prosperous age, noble mansions 
and extensive gardens began to replace the fields, 
commons, and pastures that stretched westward 
from St. Martin's Lane. One of the busiest spots 
in modern London, that is, Covent Garden, begins 
to come into prominence in London history just 
as Milton reached early manhood. For three cen- 
turies before his time the abbots of Westminster had 
owned " fair spreading pastures " here, now all 
included in the general name of " Long Acre." Part 
of this they are thought to have used for the burial 
of their dead. In Aggas's old map, a brick wall 
enclosed all but the southern side where the houses 
and enclosures separated it from the Strand. The 
property belonged to John Russell, Earl of Bed- 
ford, to whom it was given by the Crown in 1552, 
at which time it had a yearly value of less than £7. 
To-day his successor holds one of the richest rentals 
in the world. In 1631 a square was formed, and 
the famous architect Inigo Jones built an open 
arcade about the north and east sides. Upon the 
west rose a Renaissance church by the design of 



238 flDilton's JEnolanfc 

the same artist, and the south was bordered by the 
garden of Bedford House and a grove or " small 
grotto of trees most pleasant in the summer season." 
The duke, in ordering the erection of the chapel, 
declared that he would go to no expense for it, 
and it might be a barn. " Then," said Inigo Jones, 
" it shall be the handsomest barn in England," and 
fulfilled his promise. It was the first important 
Protestant church erected in England. Only the 
portico of the original church remains, as the first 
building was destroyed by fire in 1795. 

In the popular dramas written in the last part of 
Milton's lifetime, constant allusion is made to the 
fashionable and even licentious companies that fre- 
quented the piazza of Covent Garden, and it is 
safe to say that it was never at any time a haunt 
of the serious-minded Puritan. The poet Gay, 
writing in the next generation after Milton, thus 
describes the Covent Garden that he knew : 

" Where Covent Garden's famous temple stands, 
That boasts the work of Jones' immortal hands, 
Columns with plain magnificence appear, 
And graceful porches lead along the square ; 
Here oft my course I bend, when lo ! from far 
I spy the furies of the football war : 
The 'prentice quits his shop to join the crew, 
Increasing crowds the flying game pursue." 

At first, peddlers of fruit and vegetables used the 
gravelled centre of the square for their booths, and 



/BMlton's England 239 

gradually the market grew into a well-recognised 
establishment, and the open square was finally in 
1830 covered over. In Milton's later years Covent 
Garden was fashionable as a residence for the 
nobility. Bishops, dukes, and earls had here their 
town houses, and among the titled residents was the 
painter, Sir Godfrey Kneller. 

The palace on the Thames known as " Somerset 
House " was in Milton's lifetime a magnificent 
structure; built in 1544-49, it was from the time 
of Elizabeth to 1775 a residence much favoured by 
royalty. Pepys tells us in 1662 : " Indeed it is 
observed that the greatest court nowadays is there." 
It was then the residence of the queen mother, whose 
rooms he describes as " most stately and nobly 
furnished," and he remarks upon the echo on the 
stairs, " which continues a voice so long as the 
singing three notes, concords one after another, they 
all three shall sound in concert together a good while 
most pleasantly." The site occupied an area of six 
hundred feet from east to west and five hundred 
from north to south. The present large edifice, 
which was erected on the site of the old one, demol- 
ished in 1775, is used for many important public 
purposes. 




CHAPTER XIV. 

WHITEHALL. — WESTMINSTER ABBEY 

^COTLAND YARD, the headquarters of 
the Metropolitan Police, discloses in its 
cramped and dingy quarters little if any- 
thing that remains of the time when Milton lived 
within its precincts. In the days when he dwelt here 
and assisted Cromwell as his Latin secretary, some 
remnants of the former palace of the Scottish kings, 
which once had occupied this site, were still to be 
seen. Hard by at one time lived both the greatest 
architects of that age of building, Jones and Wren. 
From Scotland Yard to Cannon Row, Westminster, 
there extended in Milton's lifetime the stately old 
palace of Whitehall, built in the Tudor style of 
Hampton Court. A writer in the last days of 
Queen Elizabeth tells us that it was truly royal ; 
enclosed on one side by the Thames, on the other 
by a park which connects it with St. James's, another 
royal palace. He speaks of an immense number 
of swans, — birds favoured by royalty then as now. 
— which floated on the salty bosom of the tidal 
240 





KING'S gate at whitehai 

WESTMINSTER 
Designed by Holbein. 



L, LEADING TO 



r 






/BMlton's Enolanfc 241 

Thames as now they do upon its sweeter waters at 
Runnymede and Windsor. He also mentions that 
deer were numerous. An open way led through 
the palace grounds from Charing Cross to West- 
minster, which, although shut in by gates at either 
end. was an open thoroughfare. When Cardinal 
Wolsey owned Whitehall, it was known as " York 
Place," and did not receive the former title until 
Henry VIII. had taken possession of it. Here the 
voluptuous monarch visited his great rival in mag- 
nificence, and at a masque within these walls cast 
covetous eyes upon fair Anne Boleyn. Within these 
richly tapestried and stately halls a few months later, 
the " little great lord cardinal " bade a long fare- 
well to all his greatness, and with a heavy heart 
entered his barge at the foot of Whitehall stairs. 

Henry added many features to his new posses- 
sions, among others a stately gateway of three 
stories with mullioned windows and octagonal 
towers designed by Holbein. Sir Thomas More at 
Chelsea had discovered the merits of this artist, and 
there presented him to the king, who was a clever 
connoisseur in art as well as wives. It was in 
Whitehall that Hans Holbein painted the well- 
known portrait of the straddling monarch. From 
the advent of that shrewd politician, great sovereign, 
yet vain and silly woman, Elizabeth, Whitehall be- 



242 flDtlton'5 Enolanb 

came definitely the seat of royalty, though the Tower 
theoretically remained so. The library of this 
learned woman was well filled with books, not only 
English, but French, Latin, Greek, and Italian. 
Masques, tournaments, and every form of gorgeous 
entertainment, from Wolsey's time to that of Will- 
iam III., made money flow like water in Whitehall, 
except during the short domination of the Puritan 
party. James L, upon the burning of the Banquet 
Hall in 1615, determined to commission Inigo Jones, 
not only to build a new one, but to build a whole 
new palace, of which this hall was but the fortieth 
part. 

The Banquet Hall is in the Palladian style of 
architecture, and is 1 1 1 feet in length, and half as 
great in width and height. Its ceiling is decorated 
with pictures by Rubens, painted on canvas and sent 
from abroad. They represent the apotheosis of 
James I. and scenes from the life of Charles I. The 
original plan, which was not carried out, was to 
have included a number of mural paintings by Van 
Dyck, which should represent the history and cere- 
monies of the Order of the Garter. The palace was 
planned to cover the whole space from the Thames 
to St. James's Park, and from Charing Cross to 
Westminster. In Milton's time of residence in 
Whitehall upon the south was the Bowling Green, 



flDUton's Enalanfc 243 

and north of it the Privy Gardens. The front con- 
sisted of the existing Banquet Hall, — the only part 
of the plan of Inigo Jones that ever materialised, — 
the gateways, and a row of low gabled buildings. 
Behind these were three courts or quadrangles. 
East of the Banquet Hall were a row of offices, 
the Great Hall or Presence Chamber, and the Chapel 
and private rooms of the king and queen. The art 
treasures and library were in the " Stone Gallery," 
which ran along the east side of the Privy Garden. 
The magnificence which was displayed at Whitehall 
in Milton's early boyhood may be perceived from 
the pomp and luxury of George Villiers, afterward 
Duke of Buckingham, when he came to make his 
fortune at the court of James I. " It was common 
with him at any ordinary dancing to have his 
cloaths trimmed with great diamonds; hatbands, 
cockades, and earrings to be yoked with great and 
manifold knots of pearls — in short, to be manacled, 
fettered, and imprisoned in jewels, insomuch that at 
his going over to Paris in 1625, he had twenty- 
seven suits of cloaths made, the richest that embroid- 
ery, silk, velvet, gold, and gems could contribute; 
one of which was a white, uncut velvet, set all over, 
both suit and cloak, with diamonds valued at four- 
score thousand pounds, besides a great feather stuck 
all over with diamonds; as were also his sword, 



244 flDUton's Enolanfc 

girdle, hatband, and spurs." He drove in a coach 
with six horses, and was carried sometimes in a 
sedan-chair, which mode of conveyance then was 
new and caused much outcry against the using of 
men as beasts of burden. 

We have already alluded to the famous masque, 
which was planned by members of the Inns of 
Court at Ely Place, and carried out in 1633 to 
please the queen — an entertainment so unique in 
its splendour as to be referred to in every account of 
Whitehall. But the palace is chiefly notable, not 
for scenes of gaiety, but for that mournful sight 
which struck terror to the breast of every European 
monarch, and horrified every believer in the divine 
right of kings. On the 27th of January, 1648-49, 
the death sentence was passed upon Charles I., of 
whom a few months later one of his followers 
wrote : 

" Great Charles, thou earthly god, celestial man, . . . 
Thy heavenly virtues angels should rehearse, 
It is a theam too high for human verse." 

Cromwell hesitated long before he signed the 
death warrant. If banishment of the king could 
have secured their rights to Englishmen, gladly 
would he have urged a milder sentence. But with 
the king alive, he felt there was no surety of peace 




OLIVER CROMWELL 



i- College, Cambridge. 



flMlton's Enolanfc 245 

or justice, and after painful hesitation he set his 
seal to the death warrant. Says Masson : " At the 
centre of England was a will that had made itself 
adamant, by express vow and deliberation before- 
hand, for the very hour which now had arrived. 
Fairfax had relented . . . Vane had withdrawn 
from the work . . . there was an agony over what 
was coming among many that had helped to bring 
it to pass. Only some fifty or sixty governing 
Englishmen, with Oliver Cromwell in the midst of 
them, were prepared for every responsibility and 
stood inexorably to their task. They were the will 
of England now, and they had the army with them. 
What proportion of England besides went with 
them, it might be difficult to estimate. One private 
Londoner, at all events, can be named who approved 
thoroughly of their policy, and was ready to testify 
the same. While the sentenced king was at St. 
James's, there was lying on Milton's writing-table 
in his house in High Holborn at least the begin- 
nings of a pamphlet on which he had been engaged 
during the king's trial, and in which in vehement 
answer to the outcry of the Presbyterians generally 
... he was to defend all the recent acts of the 
army, Pride's Purge included, justify the existing 
governments of the army chiefs and the fragment 
of Parliament that assisted them, inculcate repub- 



2i6 /JDtiton's Englanfc 

lican beliefs in his countrymen, and prove to them 
above all this proposition : ' That it is lawful, and 
hath been held so through all ages, for any who 
have the power, to call to account a tyrant, or 
wicked king, and, after due conviction, to depose 
and put him to death, if the ordinary magistrate 
have neglected or denied to do it.' The pamphlet 
was not to come out in time to bear practically on 
the deed which it justified; but while the king was 
yet alive, it was planned, sketched, and in part 
written." 

Three days after his sentence the king bade fare- 
well to his sobbing little son and daughter at St. 
James's Palace, and walked across the park between 
a line of soldiers to the stairs, which then were on 
the site of the present Horse Guards. From thence 
he crossed the street by a gallery, which led him 
past the scaffold draped in black, and into his own 
bedchamber in the Banquet Hall. From there, a 
little later, he passed through a window, or possibly 
an opening in the wall, upon the scaffold, with his 
attendant and Bishop Juxon. Two unknown men 
in masks and false hair had undertaken the grim 
and dangerous task of executioner. For among the 
throngs that filled the streets from Charing Cross 
down to Westminster there were many who would 
readily have torn them in pieces. The " martyr- 



/HMlton's JEnglanfc 247 

king," as Jacobins still call him, now that the end 
of his arbitrary reign had come, behaved with 
dignity. His last words were : " To your power 
I must submit, but your authority I deny." From 
the roof of a neighbouring mansion, Archbishop 
Usher stood until he sickened at the sight and 
swooned, and was carried to his bed. Andrew Mar- 
veil's well-known lines upon this scene will be 
recalled : 

" While round the armed bands, 
Did clasp their bloody hands, 
He nothing common did or mean, 
Upon that memorable scene, 
Nor called the gods with vulgar spite, 
To vindicate his hopeless right ; 
But with his keener eye, 
The axe's edge did try ; 
Then bowed his kingly head, 
Down, as upon a bed." 

Strangely enough, it was on this very spot where 
his death forecast the dawning of that new princi- 
ple of government of the people, by the people, for 
the people, which his whole nature loathed, that 
London had seen the beginnings of the civil strife. 
Here a company of the citizens, " returning from 
Westminster, where they had been petitioning 
quietly for justice, were set upon by some of the 
court as they passed Whitehall, in the which 



248 /HMlton's Enolanb 

tumult divers were hurt, and one or more slain 
just by the Banqueting House." 

The regicides, who felt their bloody deed to be 
a sad necessity for England's safety, had no desire 
to wreak a mean revenge upon the body of the king. 
Unlike those of many far nobler men who had died 
as " traitors," his body was not dishonoured, but was 
treated with due respect. It was embalmed, and lay 
for days under a velvet pall at St. James's Palace, 
where crowds came to see it. The authorities ob- 
jected to his burial in Westminster Abbey, as the 
place was too public, and crowds might gather there. 
But they accorded him a burial in St. George's 
Chapel, Windsor, whither his body was taken in a 
hearse drawn by six horses and followed by four 
mourning coaches. His coffin was placed beside 
that of Henry VIII. within the choir. The next 
month after the death of Charles, the Parliament 
voted the use of a large part of Whitehall to Crom- 
well. Every Monday he dined with all his officers 
above the captain's rank. Milton, as his Latin secre- 
tary, and Andrew Marvell must have been often at 
his board, and Waller, his kinsman, and perhaps the 
youthful Dryden. He was a great lover of music 
and entertained those who were skilful in any form 
of art. It is through Cromwell that England owns 
to-day the Raphael cartoons at Kensington. He 



flMltcn's Enolanfc 2 49 

purchased many other of the paintings which had 
belonged to the magnificent collection of Charles I. 
and had been sold. Here his old mother died, and 
here in 1658, on a wild August day, amid the tumult 
of a storm that raged and howled over a large part 
of England, the great heart of the Protector ceased 
to beat. On the day that he lay dying, a lad of 
fifteen years, named Isaac Newton, turned the vio- 
lence of the storm to his account by jumping first 
with the wind and then against it, and computing its 
force by the difference of the distances. 

As the dying Oliver approached his end, he was 
much in prayer; an attendant has recorded some 
of these last utterances in which he commended 
God's people to the keeping of the Almighty : " Give 
them," he prayed, " consistency of judgment, one 
heart, and mutual love; and go on to deliver them 
and with the work of reformation; and make the 
name of Christ glorious in the world. Teach those 
who look too much on thy instruments, to depend 
more upon thyself. Pardon such as desire to 
trample upon the dust of a poor worm, for they are 
thy people too." Probably never by any master of 
Whitehall was such a sincerely devout and magnani- 
mous petition raised to heaven. Of the decapitation 
of his dead body and its subsequent history, when 
Charles II. was able to wreak his vengeance, we 



250 /RMlton's England 

need not speak. Neither need we rehearse the well- 
known record of the dissolute monarch who on the 
Restoration set up his profligate court at Whitehall. 
Of the last hours of Charles II. Evelyn paints a 
loathsome picture : " I can never forget the inex- 
pressible luxury and profaneness, gaming, and all 
dissoluteness, and as it were total forgetfulness of 
God (it being Sunday evening) which I was witness 
of : the king sitting and toying with his concubines, 
a French boy singing love songs in that glorious 
gallery, whilst about twenty of the great courtiers 
and other dissolute persons were at basset around a 
large table, a bank of at least two thousand pounds 
in gold before them. . . . Six days after all was in 
the dust." In the reign of William III. two fires, 
in 1 69 1 and 1697, consumed all of the palace except 
the Banquet Hall of Inigo Jones. 

The Westminster Abbey that Milton knew, unlike 
the old St. Paul's of his day, was indeed a house of 
God, and was not defiled with the intrusion of 
hucksters and dandies and the bustle of the Ex- 
change. Its lofty walls, ungrimed by smoke, rose 
fair and stately; the present towers of the west 
front were then unbuilt, and its mass presented a 
long, unbroken, horizontal sky-line. Under its 
high, embowered roof, Milton may have seen less 
warmth of colour than we, for the stained glass 




o . 



/IMlton's England 251 

is modern, but he was spared the majority of the 
pretentious and tasteless monuments which crowd 
the transepts and the side aisles to-day, and for the 
most part are in bulk in inverse proportion to their 
artistic merit, and to the importance of those whom 
they honour. Perhaps there was no man in Eng- 
land to whose sensitive soul the solemn minster 
spoke more eloquently. With a mind richly stored 
in history, and with the artist's eye and prophet's 
soul, every stone of this most venerable and beautiful 
of English churches must have been dear to him. 
It is not within the scope of this little volume even 
to touch upon the romantic history of this centre 
of English life or to examine its noble architecture, 
but only to indicate what may most have touched the 
mind and heart of the great scholar and patriot- 
reformer who often passed its portals on his walk 
from Petty France to Whitehall. 

In the south aisle of the nave are buried two 
ladies whom Milton probably knew. They are the 
two wives of Cromwell's secretary — Sir Samuel 
Morland, the inventor of the speaking trumpet and 
improver of the fire-engine. The inscriptions by 
their husband appear in Hebrew, Greek, Ethiopic, 
and English. In the north aisle is a curious monu- 
ment of 163 1 to Jane Hill. At the rear of the lady's 



252 /UMlton's JEmjlanfc 

figure is a skeleton in a winding-sheet. Among the 
memorials of his contemporaries which must have 
peculiarly interested Milton was the little slab in 
the nave marked, " O rare Ben Jonson," which slab 
was later removed to the Poets' Corner. Beneath 
a modern paving stone, which now covers the spot, 
in an upright posture was placed the coffin of the 
poet who in his last days of poverty, in 1637, asked 
Charles I. for eighteen inches of square ground in 
Westminster Abbey. He died in a house between the 
Abbey and St. Margaret's Church. Newton's tomb 
near by Milton never saw, as the youth of the man 
of science covered only Milton's later years. On 
entering the south transept, the first monument that 
must have claimed his interest was that of Camden, 
the learned antiquary. Just before going to Cam- 
bridge, in 1623, Milton may have attended the 
funeral of this man, whose great work, " Britan- 
nia " added new lustre to Elizabeth's glorious reign. 
Camden did for England what Stow did for London, 
and preserved the knowledge of the nation of that 
day. His bust, in the rich costume of his time, pre- 
sents a speaking likeness, and with his portrait in 
the National Gallery make the eminent scholar seem 
a personality as real as Raleigh's. Ben Jonson, who 
was one of his pupils when he was head master of 



L 



/UMlton's England 253 

Westminster School, lovingly ascribes to him the 
source of his own inspiration : 

" Camden, most reverend head, to whom I owe 
All that I am in acts, all that I know." 

Camden wrote in 1600 the first guide-book of the 
Abbey, which, being in Latin, would have served 
Milton better than it would the modern visitor. 
In an unmarked grave lies the body of Richard 
Hakluyt, the great geographer, who died in 1616. 
Just beyond Camden's tomb is that of the great 
scholar, Casaubon. On its front are plainly scratched 
the initials of the gentle angler, Izaak Walton, by 
himself, with the date, 1658. A few feet distant on 
the pavement a slab marks the grave of the " old, 
old, very old " man who died in 1635 at the reputed 
age of one hundred and fifty-two. " Old Parr," as 
he was known, is said to have been born in 1483, 
and married his first wife at the age of eight)), and 
his second in 1605, when he was one hundred and 
twenty-two years of age. The Earl of Arundel, 
determined to exhibit this " piece of antiquity," had 
him carried by litter from Shrewsbury and presented 
to Charles I. On being questioned by the king about 
religious matters he cautiously replied that he 
thought it safest to hold whatever religion was held 
by the reigning monarch, " for he knew that he 



254 /IDtlton's England 

came raw into the world, and thought it no point of 
wisdom to be broiled out of it," an opinion quite 
to be expected of a man who had lived through the 
reigns of all the Tudors. 

Further on, within the Poets' Corner, two monu- 
ments especially must have been dear to the author of 
" Comus " and " Lycidas." One marks the grave 
of Chaucer, who lies under a beautiful Gothic 
canopy erected in 1558, after the removal of his 
body to this spot ; the other marks that of Edmund 
Spenser, who died in 1598 in King Street, hard by, 
" for lacke of bread." Yet Dean Stanley tells us 
that " his hearse was attended by poets, and mourn- 
ful elegies and poems, with the pens that wrote 
them, were thrown into his tomb. What a funeral 
was that at which Beaumont, Fletcher, Jonson, and, 
in all probability, Shakespeare, attended! What a 
grave in which the pen of Shakespeare may be 
mouldering away ! " Of the author of the " Faerie 
Queene " Milton himself said : " Our sage and 
serious Spenser, whom I dare be known to think a 
better teacher than Scotus or Aquinas." Near by 
to Spenser's tomb is the monument to Ben Jonson, 
at some distance from his grave, as has just been 
said, and close at hand are the memorials to Dry- 
den, Drayton, Cowley, and Francis Beaumont, 
Milton's famous contemporaries. If the poet could 




IX THE POETS' CORNER 



r 



flMlton's EnQlanfc 255 

have looked forward two generations he might have 
seen his own counterfeit presentment in marble upon 
these walls. By that time the royalist feeling against 
him had abated, and when in 1737 this belated 
recognition of his greatness was placed upon the 
wall. Doctor Gregory remarked to Doctor Johnson : 
" I have seen erected in the church a bust of that 
man whose name I once knew considered as a pollu- 
tion of its walls." 

After Shakespeare's death there was a strong 
desire to remove his bones from Stratford to the 
Abbey, upon which Milton and Jonson both pro- 
tested. The former wrote: 

" What needs my Shakespeare for his honoured bones 
The labour of an age in piled stones ?." 

and Jonson more emphatically exclaimed: 

" My Shakespeare rise ! I will not lodge thee by 
Chaucer or Spenser, or bid Beaumont lie 
A little further on to make thee room ; 
Thou art a monument without a tomb, 
And art alive still while thy book doth live 
And we have wits to read and praise to give." 

In St. Benedict's Chapel may be noted the graves 
of Bishop Bilson, Doctor Tunson, Sir Robert An- 
struther, and Sir Robert Ayton, — famous men of 
Milton's time. 



256 /IMlton's lEnglanfc 

In St. Edmund's Chapel, farther on, Milton as 
a lad of fourteen may have seen in 1622 the young 
man interred whose tomb is surmounted by a beau- 
tiful figure of a youth in Roman armour. Hard 
by under a lofty canopy lie two notable recumbent 
figures, which mark the grave of the Earl and 
Countess of Shrewsbury, and show the style of 
costume of Milton's boyhood years. 

Among the monuments of his contemporaries in 
the chapel of Henry VII. that must have awakened 
a sensation of disgust in the mind of the Puritan 
poet, was that of the Duke of Buckingham, whose 
barbaric splendour of attire has already been noted, 
and who was murdered in 1628. Near by his huge 
and ostentatious tomb, so characteristic of the man 
whom it commemorates, lie under the pavement the 
graves of his king, James I., and his consort. 

We may be sure that the graves which most 
interested Milton here were those of Oliver Crom- 
well, his mother and sister, and his daughter, 
Elizabeth Claypole, his son-in-law, Ireton, and 
Bradshaw, who was president of the tribunal 
which condemned Charles I. The Genoese envoy 
of the time thus described Cromwell's death and 
burial in his despatch to the Council of Genoa : 
" He left the world with unimaginable valour, 
prudence, and charity, and more like a priest or 



/IDilton's Englant) 257 

monk than a man who had fashioned and worked 
so mighty an engine so few years. . . . His body 
was opened and embalmed, and little trace of dis- 
ease found therein; which was not the cause of 
his death, but rather the continual fever which 
came upon him from sorrow and melancholy at 
Madame Claypole's death." Cromwell's body lay 
in state at Somerset House, and was thence es- 
corted to the tomb by an immense throng of 
mourners, which included the city companies. 
" The effigy or statue of the dead, made most lifelike 
in royal robes, crown on head, in one hand the 
sceptre and in the other the globe, was laid out on 
a bier richly adorned and borne hither in a coach 
made for the purpose, open on every side, and 
adorned with many plumes and banners." It is 
said that Cromwell especially loved the Abbey, and 
instituted the custom of commemorating English 
worthies within its walls. Admiral Blake was the 
first to receive this honour in 1657. " Cromwell 
caused him to be brought up by land to London in 
all the state that could be; and to encourage his 
officers to adventure their lives that they might be 
pompously buried, he was with all solemnity possi- 
ble interred in the Chapel of Henry VII., among the 
monuments of the kings." Who can doubt that 
Milton stood in sightless grief beside these tombs, 



258 fliMlton's England 

before the desecration of " Oliver's Vault? " Only 
the body of Cromwell's daughter was left in peace, 
and still remains. His mother and sister were 
reburied in the green, and the reader already knows 
what was the vile treatment of the other bodies. It 
is said that to the royalist dean of Westminster, 
Thomas Sprat, we owe the refusal of interment in 
the Abbey to the " regicide " John Milton. Had 
he been buried later where CromwelFs body had 
lain, he too might have been thrust forth. It was 
this dean who esteemed Cowley as a superior poet 
to Milton, and called the former the " Pindar, 
Horace, and Virgil of England." In the south 
aisle lie General George Monck and Elizabeth, 
Queen of Bohemia, eldest daughter of James I., 
whose marriage we have seen was celebrated by a 
merry masque within the Temple grounds. This 
was the English princess for whom a part of 
Heidelberg Castle was built ; she was mother of 
Prince Rupert, whose strenuous efforts to save 
the fortunes of his uncle, Charles I., did not endear 
him to Milton and his friends. In this chapel lies a 
wretched victim of her cousin, James I. This is 
the Lady Arabella Stuart, whose marriage so dis- 
pleased the king that he immured her in the Tower, 
where, bereft of reason by her miseries, she died 
when Milton was a boy. 



L 



/HMlton'3 England 259 

At the eastern end of the north aisle of the chapel 
of Henry VII. is a baby's cradle-tomb, which has 
been the frequent theme of verse. Standing beside 
the little marble form of this daughter of James I., 
Milton may have felt a pang of heart as he thought 
of his own little one buried in St. Margaret's, but a 
stone's throw distant. Of those who were associated 
with Milton's public work at Whitehall, was Admiral 
Edward Popham, general of the Fleet of the Repub- 
lic under Cromwell, who died in 1651. He was 
buried at the state's expense in the chapel of 
Henry VII., but after the Restoration his monument, 
on which is his figure full size in armour, was 
removed to John the Baptist's Chapel and the 
inscription on it was erased. Opposite his tomb 
is the grave of Robert Devereux, third Earl of 
Essex, son of Elizabeth's unhappy favourite, who, 
after serving King Charles, became General-in- 
Chief of the Parliamentarian army in 1642. He 
died in 1646, and was buried with high honours by 
the Independents. In St. John's Chapel rests the 
body of the wife of Colonel Scot, one of the judges 
of Charles I., who was executed at Charing Cross. 

At the foot of the steps which lead to the chapel 
of Henry VII., in 1674, — the same year in which 
Milton died, — was laid under a nameless stone the 
bodv of the famous Earl of Clarendon, who was 



260 ZlDUton's England 

born in 1608-9, the same year in which the poet 
was born. This famous Tory, the historian of the 
Civil Wars and Restoration, was perhaps more 
responsible than any other man for creating" that 
popular detestation of the name of Cromwell which 
prevailed until the present generation had been 
better instructed by less partisan critics. After two 
hundred years his name was inscribed upon the 
stone that covers his ashes. Within the Abbey rest 
twenty of his relatives and descendants, among 
them his royal granddaughters, Queen Mary and 
Queen Anne. Not far distant, in the north ambula- 
tory was interred in 1643 tne body of the redoubt- 
able John Pym, nicknamed " King Pym " by the 
Royalists, for as Clarendon himself said : " He 
seemed to all men to have the greatest influence upon 
the House of Commons of any man, and in truth 
I think he was at that time (1640), and some 
months after, the most popular man and the most 
able to do hurt that hath lived in any time." ! Two 

1 It is interesting here to contrast John Morley's judgment with 
that of Clarendon: 

" Surrounded by men who were often apt to take other views, 
Pym, if ever English statesmen did, took broad ones ; and to impose 
broad views upon the narrow is one of the things that a party leader 
exists for. He had the double gift, so rare even among leaders in 
popular assemblies, of being at once practical and elevated ; a master 
of tactics and organising arts, and yet the inspirer of sound and 
lofty principles. How can we measure the perversity of a king and 



L 



flDilton's England 261 

years after Pym's burial, there was laid close to 
his grave the body of William Strode, one of the 
five members demanded by Charles I. when he made 
his famous entry into the House of Commons with 
an armed force in 1641-2. The bodies of both were 
exhumed in 1661, and flung with others of their 
compatriots into a pit outside the Abbey walls. 
There is every reason to assume that Milton would 
have attended the funerals of both of these men. A 
man whom he must have known well by reputation, 
Doctor Peter Heylin, who died in 1662, is buried 
beneath the sub-dean's seat in the north aisle of the 
choir. He was Laud's chaplain, and wrote a life of 
the great archbishop; under Charles I. he had for 
a time supreme authority in the Abbey and super- 
intended its repairs. During the Civil War he suf- 
fered and was deprived of his property, but on the 
accession of Charles II., he was reinstated in the 
Abbey. It is interesting to note that the coronation 
chair of oak, decorated with false jewels, which has 
been used at coronations since the time of Ed- 
ward I., has never left the Abbey except when it 
was taken to Westminster Hall, when Oliver Crom- 
well was there installed as Lord Protector. 



counsellors who forced into opposition a man so imbued with the 
deep instinct of government, so whole-hearted, so keen of sight, so 
skilful in resource as Pym ? " 



262 flbtlton's England 

A few of the scenes that the great minster wit- 
nessed in Milton's time may be alluded to. The 
funeral of James I. in 1625 was the most magnifi- 
cent that England had ever seen. The hearse was 
fashioned by Inigo Jones. The sermon was two 
hours in length. Mourning cloaks were given to 
nine thousand persons, and the rest of the outlay 
was proportionate. No wonder that Charles I. 
within two months sent word to the Commons that 
" the ordinary revenue is clogged with debts, and 
exhausted with the late king's funeral and other 
expenses of necessity and honour." The Abbey 
suffered somewhat from the Puritan hatred of 
images and " idolatry," during the Commonwealth. 
By order of Parliament the sacred vestments were 
seized and burned. Of the curious wax effigies of 
monarchs who antedated Milton's death, only one 
is still preserved. It is that of Charles II. and is 
robed in red velvet with collar and ruffles of real 
point lace. For a long time it stood above his grave 
in the chapel of Henry VII. These waxworks used 
to be' publicly exhibited, after which the cap was 
passed around for contributions. Milton, in his 
boyhood, may have gazed in wonder at the gorgeous 
figure of Elizabeth arrayed as a later one still is 
to-day, in her own jewelled stomacher and velvet 
robe embroidered with gold; doubtless he found 



flDUton's England 263 

a visit to the effigies of Westminster Abbey as 
entertaining as a modern boy finds a visit to Madame 
Tussaud's to-day. From the time of Edward I. it 
was customary to make effigies of kings. Up to the 
time of Henry V. the embalmed bodies and not the 
effigies were displayed upon the funeral car. At 
first these figures were made of wood, with perhaps 
the faces and hands of plaster. These were set up 
in the church for a season, after which many of 
them were preserved in presses standing in a row, 
and shown as has been described. In Milton's 
time it seems evident that the list included Edward 
I. and Eleanor, Edward III. and Philippa, Henry 
V. and Katherine, Henry VII. and Elizabeth of 
York, James I. and Anne of Denmark, and Henry, 
Prince of Wales. 

It is probable that Sir Christopher Wren's plan 
for the completion of the Abbey would have materi- 
ally added to its beauty. His scheme is said to 
have included a graceful Gothic spire rising from 
the low central tower. The incongruous towers of 
the west front were chiefly due to Hawksmore. 




CHAPTER XV. 

the precincts of the abbey. westminster 

palace. — st. Margaret's 

TURING the Civil War, the spot within 
Westminster which most interested every 
reformer was that where, for over five 
years, the famous Westminster Assembly gathered. 
During that time this body of one hundred and 
forty-nine prelates and learned men held over fifteen 
hundred sessions, at first in the chapel of Henry 
VII., and later in the warmer and cosier apartment 
known as the " Jerusalem Chamber." This room 
was in the present generation occupied by the 
scholars who for years laboured together on the 
revised version of the Bible. The Assembly was 
called by Parliament " to be consulted with by 
them on the settling of the government and liturgy 
of the Church, and for the vindicating and clearing 
of the doctrine of the Church of England from false 
aspersions and interpretations." In that age, when 
religious questions were paramount, the work that 
devolved upon these men demanded insight, honesty, 
and great courage. The members, for the most part, 
264 



L 



/HMlton's England 265 

were elected from the different counties and merely 
confirmed by Parliament; but to these, ten members 
of the House of Lords and twenty members of the 
House of Commons were added. Only those ques- 
tions could be considered that should be proposed by 
either or both houses of Parliament. Four shillings 
a day for his expenses was allowed each clerical 
member, with freedom from all other duties except 
attendance on the Assembly. Among the one hun- 
dred and forty-nine were several members, like 
Archbishop Usher, who were defenders of Episco- 
pacy. In that age no modern questions as to 
inspiration disturbed the minds of devout men, but 
church government was to them a matter of such 
serious moment as the modern mind can scarcely 
understand. As the results of these prolonged and 
serious conferences, Dean Stanley says we have the 
" Directory, the Longer and Shorter Catechism, and 
that famous Confession of Faith which, alone 
within these Islands, was imposed by law on the 
whole kingdom ; and which, alone of all Protestant 
Confessions, still, in spite of its sternness and 
narrowness, retains a hold on the minds of its 
adherents to which its fervour and its logical 
coherence in some measure entitle it." 

During Milton's lifetime the Chapter House, 
which had become public property after the Dissolu- 



266 flMlton's England 

tion, was used for storing public documents, and 
here he may have seen the ancient Domesday Book, 
which until within fifty years was treasured there. 
At the time of the Commonwealth, the ancient 
chamber close by the Chapter House, and known 
as the " Pyx," held the regalia, and was broken 
open by the officers of the House of Commons, in 
order to make an inventory, when the Church au- 
thorities refused to surrender the keys. The Pyx no 
longer holds the regalia, which, after the Restora- 
tion, was transferred to the Tower. The keys of 
its double doors are seven, and are deposited with 
seven distinct officers of the Exchequer. The door 
is lined with human skins. Within the cloisters 
Henry Lawes, the musician, was buried in 1662. 

Near by the Abbey stands Westminster School, 
founded early in the sixteenth century upon the 
site of the ancient monastery. The dormitory has 
been turned into a noble schoolroom ninety-six feet 
in length. Camden, the famous antiquary, was once 
master of the school, and among its famous pupils 
whose lives touched Milton's, were the poets, George 
Herbert, Cowley, who published poems while he 
was at school here, and Dryden. Among men 
famous in other walks of life were the great geog- 
rapher, Hakluyt, and Sir Christopher Wren. Hak- 
Juyt, who died the same year that Shakespeare died, 



/HMlton's En^lanC) 267 

in 1616, tells us that his interest in discovery and 
in naval science began when he was a Queen's 
Scholar in " that fruitful nurserie." At Oxford he 
pursued his favourite studies, and read " whatso- 
ever printed or written discoveries or voyages he 
found extant in Greeke, Latine, Italian, Spanish, 
Portugall, French, or Englishe languages." Evelyn 
says in his " Diary : " On " May 13th, 1661, I heard 
and saw such exercises at the election of scholars 
at Westminster Schools to be sent to the university, 
in Latin, Greek, Hebrew, and Arabic, in themes and 
extempry verses, as wonderfully astonished me in 
such youths, with such readiness and wit, some of 
whom not above twelve or thirteen years of age." 
Here Milton may have witnessed, on a Christmas- 
tide, a play of Plautus or of Terence, given by 
the boys of Westminster according to their annual 
custom, which is still maintained. 

In the seventeenth century, the double Gatehouse 
of Westminster, which once stood on the site of the 
Royal Aquarium of to-day, held as prisoner Sir 
Walter Raleigh, who passed the last night of his life 
here. The night before his execution his cousin 
called on him; Raleigh tried to relieve his sadness 
with pleasantry, when his cousin remonstrated with 
the words, " Sir, take heed you go not too much 
upon the brave hand, for your enemies will take 



268 flDilton's England 

exceptions at that." " Good Charles," replied Ral- 
eigh, " give me leave to be merry, for this is the 
last merriment that ever I shall have in this world, 
but when I come to the last part, thou shalt see I 
will look on it like a man," and even so he did. 
When he had reached the scaffold in Palace Yard 
the next day, and had taken off his gown and doub- 
let, he asked the executioner to show him his axe. 
When he had taken it in his hands he felt along 
the edge, and smiling said : " This is a sharp medi- 
cine, but it is a physician for all diseases." Then 
he granted his forgiveness to the sheriff who knelt 
before him. When his head was on the block, before 
the fatal blow, he said : " So the heart be right, 
it is no matter which way the head lies." So 
perished the bold discoverer and coloniser, the 
author and gallant knight, when ten-year-old John 
Milton lived in Bread Street. Near the spot where 
his body rests in the church of St. Margaret's, West- 
minster, now rises a memorial window presented by 
Americans and inscribed by Lowell in remembrance 
of Raleigh's connection with America : 

" The New World's sons, from England's breasts we drew 
Such milk as bids remember whence we came ; 
Proud of her past, wherefrom our future grew, 
This window we inscribe with Raleigh's name." 

In this prison, afterward, John Hampden and Sir 
Tohn Eliot were confined, and Richard Lovelace, 



/IMlton's England 269 

who was imprisoned for his devotion to Charles I., 
wrote the well-known lines : 

" Stone walls do not a prison make, 
Nor iron bars a cage ; 
Minds innocent and quiet take 
That for a hermitage." 

Where Westminster Palace Hotel now stands, 
in the ancient Almonry of the Abbey, Caxton set 
up his press, and in 1474 printed his first book — 
the " Game and Play of Chess." 

In Milton's day, a grim old fortress marked the 
" Sanctuary," or place of refuge for criminals. 
From the sacred shelter of this retreat the mother 
of the little Edward V. surrendered him with sad 
misgiving to his cruel uncle, who carried him to 
the Tower. This spot was a resort for persecuted 
saint and guilty sinner. Within its walls he was 
as secure as was the ancient Hebrew in his city of 
refuge. When Milton lived in Petty France and 
passed from there to Whitehall by the Sanctuary, it 
had fallen into disrepute and only the most aban- 
doned sought its shelter. The Sanctuary at West- 
minster was only one of thirty known to have been 
contemporaneous with it in the monasteries of Eng- 
land before the Dissolution. 

The magnificent royal palace of Westminster, 
which was built by Edward the Confessor, and 



270 flDilton's England 

improved by William the Conqueror, had largely 
disappeared in Milton's time. The Great Hall and 
the crypt under the chapel of St. Stephen are 
almost all that now remain, but Milton, in addition 
to these, saw the chapel itself and its cloisters, and 
the famous " Star Chamber " and " Painted Cham- 
ber," which were preserved until the fire which 
burned the Houses of Parliament in 1834. Previous 
to the Dissolution, the Commons had sat within the 
ancient Chapter House of the Abbey, at an incon- 
venient distance from the House of Lords. Then 
they were transferred to St. Stephen's Chapel, an 
oblong building ninety feet in length and thirty in 
width, which had externally at each corner an 
octagonal tower. It was lighted by five windows 
on each side, between which its walls were supported 
by great buttresses. It had two stories, and the upper 
one was occupied by the House of Commons. These 
walls have echoed to the ringing words of Eliot, 
Hampden, Pym, Sir Harry Vane, and Cromwell. 
to Burke and Fox and Pitt, and the long line of 
valiant Englishmen who never confounded patriot- 
ism and loyalty to country with subserviency to the 
will of any fallible man whom chance had placed 
upon the nation's throne. Here Eliot, in sharp, 
emphatic words, which contrasted with the ponder- 
ous phraseology of the time, cried out against the 



flMlton's Bnglanfc 271 

gorgeously apparelled and arrogant Buckingham : 
" He has broken those nerves and sinews of our 
land, the stores and treasures of the king. There 
needs no search for it. It is too visible. His 
profuse expenses, his superfluous feasts, his mag- 
nificent buildings, his riots, his excesses, what are 
they but the visible evidences of an express ex- 
hausting of the state, a chronicle of his waste of 
the revenues of the Crown? . . . Through the 
power of state and justice he has dared ever to strike 
at his own ends." Bold words ! which took more 
courage than to face the cannon's mouth, for his 
protest then and later meant to face a dungeon in 
the Tower, from which only death gave him release. 
But Eliot's words were a tonic to his fellows, 
and when they met two years later, in 1628, Sir 
Thomas Wentworth showed himself a worthy fol- 
lower : " We must vindicate our ancient liberties," 
said he, " we must reinforce the laws made by our 
ancestors. We must set such a stamp upon them, as 
no licentious spirit shall dare hereafter to invade 
them.'' Of the Petition of Right, and the Remon- 
strance; of the dissolution of Parliament, and the 
eleven years when these walls were silent; of 
Charles's revival of Star Chamber trials to fill his 
empty exchequer by the fines, and the Parliamentary 
history of the Civil War, and all that centres around 



272 flDtlton's Englanb 

these walls which echoed with the eloquence of 
England's noblest statesmen, there is no space to 
speak. 

The Star Chamber was probably so named from 
being anciently ornamented with golden stars. It 
stood parallel with the river on the eastern side 
of Palace Yard and was formerly the council 
chamber of the police. It was a beautiful panelled 
room with mullioned windows. The lords who 
tried offences were bound by no law, but they 
created and defined the offences which they pun- 
ished. Every penalty except death could be inflicted. 
In such tyrannies the Star Chamber could have 
been exceeded only by the terrible Council of Ten 
in Venice. One of the first deeds of the new Parlia- 
ment of 1 64 1 was to abolish the Star Chamber. 
That year a mob of six thousand citizens in Old 
Palace Yard had come armed with swords and 
clubs, and had seized the entrance to the House of 
Lords and called for justice against Lord Strafford. 

The Painted Chamber was named from its mural 
decorations, which antedated Milton's time at least 
three hundred years. It was strangely proportioned, 
eighty feet long, twenty broad, and fifty feet high. 
Here the Confessor died. Here was the trial of 
Charles I. when it was adjourned from Westminster 
flail. Here his death warrant was signed, which 



/IDtlton's EnGlanfc 273 

is now preserved within the library of the House of 
Lords. 

Says Knight : " Amid all the misgovernment of 
the reign of Charles II., the rights of the House of 
Commons and its true position in the Constitution 
were recognised in a manner in which they had never 
been in the former days of the monarchy. Attempts 
were made to manage the Parliament, and also to 
govern without it; but when it was suffered to 
meet, its debates were nearly as free as they are 
at present, and took as wide a range as they have 
ever done since. The Commons for session after 
session during this reign discussed the question of 
excluding the heir presumptive to the throne, the 
king's own brother, and even passed a bill for that 
purpose. Would any approach to such an inter- 
ference as that have been endured either by Eliza- 
beth or James I. ? . . . and this change, this gain had 
been brought about by the Long Parliament and the 
great Rebellion." 

In the time of Milton the pillory stood before 
Westminster Hall, and here he may have seen, on 
one of his trips from Horton in 1636, the stiff-necked 
Prynne branded on either cheek, and exposed with 
one ear cut off, according to the barbarous methods 
of the time, for writings which were supposed to 
have reflected on the queen. In those days the 



274 /Bittern's JEnglanfc 

noble proportions of the hall were partly masked 
by neighbouring shops. The architecture and the 
long history of this famous hall of William Rufus 
are almost as familiar as those of Westminster 
Abbey, and therefore need little comment here. The 
story of Guy Fawkes and the sentence passed upon 
the conspirators here in 1606 was one of the first bits 
of English history that a boy born but two years 
later would have heard. In 1640, Charles I. and his 
queen, concealed behind the tapestry of a dark cabi- 
net, listened to the trial of Strafford, which lasted 
eighteen days. Nine years later the king sat at his 
own trial beneath the banners of his troops, which 
had been taken at the battle of Naseby. When the 
clerk read the words : " Charles Stuart, as a tyrant, 
traitor, murderer," etc., the king is said to have 
laughed in the face of the court. In Pepys's diary 
we get a glimpse, a few years later, of the com- 
mercial uses to which this stately edifice had been 
degraded, for we find little booths and stalls for 
selling scarfs and trifles were ranged along the walls 
of the interior. More than a hundred years later, 
part of die hall seems to have been reserved for 
stalls, which presumably were removed for coro- 
nation days and the great functions, for which its 
stately proportions are so well fitted. The building 
is one of the most spacious edifices of stone whose 




WESTMINSTER HALL 
rlegun by William Rufus in 1097. Here William Wallace, Sir Thomas M 
Sir Thomas Wyatt, Robert Devereux (Earl of Essex), Guy Fawkes, the 
of Strafford, and Charles I. were condemned to death. The chief access tc 
House of Commons in Milton's lifetime was by an archway on the east : 
through which Charles I. passed to arrest the Five Members. Here Crom\ 
in 1653, wearing the royal purple, and holding a gold sceptre in one hand a 
Bible in the other, was saluted as Lord Protector. 

Frotn an old engrazntig. 



flDUton's JEnglanfc 275 

roof is unsupported. The roof of Irish oak is said 
to be always free from spiders and insects. 

Close under the shadow of the towering Abbey 
lies the little church, St. Margaret's, which must 
have had peculiarly tender associations in Milton's 
mind. Here he buried his beloved second wife, 
whom, from Aldermanbury church, he had taken to 
his home in Petty France, near the Abbey, for one 
short happy year of married life. It is of her 
that he speaks in his beautiful sonnet beginning : 

" Methought my late espoused saint, 
Brought to me, like Alcestis, from the grave." 

The large memorial window to Milton at the 
west end of the church was in recent years presented 
by Mr. Childs of Philadelphia. This depicts numer- 
ous scenes from " Paradise Lost " and from Mil- 
ton's life. He is represented as a youth visiting the 
aged Galileo, and as the old blind poet dictating his 
immortal lines to his two daughters. The inscrip- 
tion by Whittier expresses the thought and feeling 
not only of the New England poet, but of every 
American scholar : 

" The New World honours him whose lofty plea 

For England's freedom made her own more sure, 
Whose song immortal as his theme shall be 

Their common freehold while both worlds endure." 



276 /HMiton's England 

Amongst the Puritans who preached here was 
the famous Richard Baxter, author of " The Saints' 
Rest,"' whose glum visage in the National Gallery 
reveals little of the true nobility of his character 
and of his well-ordered mind. The modern inscrip- 
tion by Lowell on Raleigh's memorial here has been 
already mentioned. 

The church is rich in monuments of figures clad 
in the fashions of Milton's time and that which 
just preceded it, the architectural accessories of 
which indicate the gradual deterioration of Renais- 
sance decoration. The rare old glass of the chancel 
window is referred to in every guide-book, and its 
remarkable history need not be here detailed. In 
the reign of Charles I. fast-day sermons were 
preached here, and both houses of Parliament met 
here with the Assembly of Divines, and prayed be- 
fore taking the covenant. 




CHAPTER XVI. 

LAMBETH PALACE. — ST. SAVIOUR'S. — LONDON 
BRIDGE 

|N Milton's day, London Bridge, over the 
narrowest part of the Thames, was the 
only bridge that spanned the silent high- 
way between the Tower and Lambeth. The ven- 
erable pile of buildings which then, as now, was the 
chief point of interest on the southern bank, was 
usually reached by one of the many barges that 
plied up and down and across from shore to shore. 
In Milton's boyhood its gray towers had already 
marked for three centuries the residence of the 
Archbishops of Canterbury. It has now been the 
home of more than fifty primates. The student 
of English history will find no building, with the 
exception of the Tower and the Abbey, which brings 
him so closely into connection with the whole his- 
tory of England as does Lambeth Palace. It lies 
low upon the site of an ancient marsh overflowed by 
the Thames at this, its greatest width, this side of 
London Bridge. As late as Milton's boyhood the 
shore between Lambeth Church and Blackfriars was 
277 



27 s /HMlton's Englanfc 

a haunt of wild fowl and a royal hunting-ground. 
A grove stood then on the site of the long line of 
St. Thomas's Hospital. Lambeth Bridge, so called, 
was at that time simply a landing-place. As every 
schoolboy remembers, it was here that on a December 
night in 1688, Mary of Modena, the fair queen of 
James II., alighted on her flight from Whitehall, 
disguised as a washerwoman; under the shelter of 
the tower of Lambeth she cowered, awaiting the 
coach that was to rescue her, while in an agony of 
fear she embraced the parcel of linen which held 
concealed the infant who was to be known in his- 
tory as the " Pretender." 

The visitor to Lambeth will find it worth his 
while to pause a few minutes before presenting his 
letter of permission to enter the palace, and spend 
the brief time in Lambeth Church, if only to see 
the quaint old window of the peddler and his dog, 
a memorial of the peddler who centuries since gave 
an almost worthless acre of land to Lambeth, from 
which it has since drawn large revenues. There 
is a peal of eight bells in the old gray tower — the 
music of the bells was one that our forefathers loved 
apparently more than other folk. " The English are 
vastly fond of great noises that fill the air." wrote 
Hentzner shortly before Milton's birth, " such as 
firing of cannon, beating of drums, and ringing of 



/IMlton's Biujlanb 279 

bells. It is common that a number of them who 
have got a glass in their heads do get up into some 
belfry, and ring bells for hours together, for the 
sake of exercise. Hence this country has been called 
' the ringing island.' " 

In Milton's time the buildings of Lambeth were 
less extensive than they are to-day. Its beautiful, 
lofty gateway known as " Morton's," which was 
built in 1490, is of red brick with stone trimmings, 
and has an arched doorway under a large window 
in the middle portion. It is perhaps the largest 
and best specimen of the early Tudor work that now 
remains in England. It is flanked by two massive 
square towers five stories high. At this gate, from 
earliest times until recently, a dole of money, bread, 
and provisions was weekly given to thirty poor 
parishioners of Lambeth. In earlier times the hos- 
pitality that was offered was excessive and encour- 
aged beggary. Stow tells us of the gifts of farthing 
loaves which amounted to the sum of £500 a year. 
At present the doles amount to about £200 a year 
and are given only to well-known persons. In addi- 
tion to these doles, huge baskets of fragments from 
the three tables in the long dining-halls sufficed, as 
Strype tells us, " to fill the bellies of a great number 
of hungry people that waited at the gate." Some 
conception of the size of Cranmer's establishment 



280 flMlton'8 EnQlanfc 

may be gathered from the authentic list of his house- 
hold : " Steward, treasurer, comptroller, gamators, 
clerk of the kitchen, caterer, clerk of the spicery, 
bakers, pantlers, yeomen of the horse, ushers, 
butlers of wine and ale, larderers, squilleries, ushers 
of the hall, porter, ushers of the chamber, daily 
waiters in the great chamber, gentlemen ushers, 
yeomen of the chamber, carver, sewer, cupbearer, 
grooms of the chamber, marshal groom ushers, 
almoner, cooks, chandler, butchers, master of the 
horse, yeomen of the wardrobe, and harbingers." 
Over such a rich and splendid household did the 
Establishment place the man above all others who 
was to be to England its highest embodiment of 
the spirit of the young Carpenter of Nazareth. 
To-day the Archbishop of Canterbury is given two 
residences, and a salary of £15,000, that he may keep 
up these establishments; that of the average curate 
is about £100. 

The great hall, which to-day contains the library, 
is on the site of that of Boniface, who built the first 
in the thirteenth century. Archbishop Juxon, who 
attended Charles I. upon the scaffold, rebuilt the 
present edifice after the original model, which had 
been destroyed during the Commonwealth. One 
of the great treasures of this library is Caxton's 
" Chronicles of Great Britain," which was printed 



flDilton's England 281 

in 1480 at Westminster. The Mazarin Bible, the 
Life of Laud, with the autograph of Charles I., and 
many books and manuscripts of great rarity and 
value are also preserved here. The library is open 
to the public under proper regulations on five days 
in the week. Among the names of eminent men 
who have served as librarians over this small but 
precious library, none interests us more than that 
of John Richard Green, the historian of the English 
people. 

The chapel, built in the last half of the thirteenth 
century, is the oldest part that remains. An open- 
ing into Cranmer's ancient " parloir " is now the 
organ-loft. From the chancel one has a glimpse 
of the original beautiful ceiling. The wall pillars 
of Purbeck marble in the atrium are said to be one 
thousand years old. In this chapel two of the first 
American bishops were consecrated. The oak screen 
was erected by Archbishop Laud. This chapel con- 
tained the windows that were destroyed in the Civil 
Wars, which served as such a theme of controversy 
in Laud's trial. He testified as follows : " The first 
thing the Commons have in their evidence against 
me, is the setting up and repairing Popish images 
and pictures in the glass windows of my chapel at 
Lambeth, and amongst others the picture of Christ 
hanging on the cross between two thieves in the 



282 nDilton's England 

east window; of God the Father in the form of a 
little old man with a glory, striking Miriam with a 
leprosy; of the Holy Ghost descending in the 
form of a dove; and of Christ's Nativity, Last 
Supper, Resurrection, Ascension, and others. . . . 
To which I answer first, That I did not set these 
images up, but found them there before; Secondly, 
that I did only repair the windows which were so 
broken, and the chapel, which lay so nastily before 
that I was ashamed to behold, and could not resort 
to it but with some disdain, which caused me to 
repair it to my great cost ; Thirdly, that I made up 
the history of these old broken pictures, not by any 
pattern in the mass book, but only by help of the 
fragments and remainders of them which I com- 
pared with the story." It is related that at a dinner 
of the domestics during Laud's primacy, the king's 
jester pronounced the grace, " Give great praise 
to God, but little Laud to the devil," for which jest 
he paid by long imprisonment. 

In the so-called " Lollards' Tower " at the west 
end of the chapel, the only part of the existing 
palace that is built of stone, is a niche in which 
was placed the image of St. Thomas a Becket, to 
which Dean Stanley tells us " the watermen of the 
Thames doffed their caps as they rode in their 
countless barges." 




THE LOLLARDS' TOWER, LAMBETH PALACE 

Fro vi an old engraving. 



flMlton's England 283 

The small room at the top of the tower is wain- 
scoted with oak over an inch thick, upon which 
prisoners chained to its iron rings have carved 
words in early English and Latin. Through the 
oubliette in the floor dead prisoners were doubtless 
dropped into the Thames, which in former days 
washed the very walls of Lambeth, and swept under 
this tower. Whether any Lollards were ever lodged 
here is very doubtful, although it is true that Wyclif, 
the arch-Lollard, was at one time examined for 
his opinions, by the bishops at Lambeth. The 
real Lollards' Tower seems to have been an adjunct 
of old St. Paul's Cathedral. More probably the 
prisoners here were Episcopalians of Milton's own 
time. 

In the dark crypt, the wretched queen, Anne 
Boleyn, heard from the lips of Cranmer the annul- 
ment of her marriage with Henry, and was forced 
to affirm the disinheritance of her offspring. From 
thence she went to the Tower and her doom. In 
this same palace, where she lay a prisoner in 1533, 
her predecessor, Katharine of Aragon, was a guest 
on her arrival in England in 1501. Milton must 
doubtless sometime have visited this princely resi- 
dence, and have mused upon the martyred Cranmer 
and Latimer and Sir Thomas More, and the long 
list of kings and queens and men, who, as masters, 



284 /JDilton's Enalanb 

guests, or prisoners, have slept within these walls. 
Of all the noted men who were connected with 
Lambeth in his day, none, of course, so stirred his 
spirit as did Archbishop Laud, who lived here, and 
exercised his power in the Star Chamber, during 
the years when Parliament was silenced. From 
1633 until his committal to the Tower on the charge 
of treason in 1641 after the assembling of the Long 
Parliament, he was master here. It was while here 
at Lambeth that he supervised the compilation of 
the Service Book; when this was enforced in 1637 
upon the Scottish churches, it was so repugnant to 
them that the riot begun in Edinburgh, by Jenny 
Geddes flinging her stool in St. Giles's Cathedral 
at the bishop's head, initiated a national revolt, 
which led to the signing of the famous Scottish 
National Covenant. Milton at this time, at the 
age of thirty, was living at Horton. Little by little 
the resolute archbishop came to be looked upon by 
men of Milton's way of thinking as one whose sys- 
tem demanded submission to absolutism in the state. 
The student of Milton's prose writings is familiar 
with the troublous history of Laud's time, and the 
ludicrously trivial matters that then estranged ear- 
nest men. But, while the ceremonies permitted in 
the church two generations later were practically 
those that Laud had so zealously striven for, the 



/HMlton's England 285 

result, says Gardiner, " was only finally attained by 
a total abandonment of all Laud's methods. What 
had been impossible to effect in a church to the 
worship of which every person in the land was 
obliged to conform, became possible in a church 
which any one who pleased was at liberty to 
abandon.'' After Laud's execution the see of 
Canterbury was vacant nearly seventeen years. 
Among the many portraits of the archbishops which 
hang at Lambeth, the portrait of Laud by Van Dyck 
is one of the most admirable. We read that his suc- 
cessor, Sheldon, in 1665, in the time of the Great 
Plague, " continued in his palace at Lambeth whilst 
the contagion lasted, preserving by his charities 
multitudes who were sinking under disease and 
want, and by his pastoral exertions procured benevo- 
lences to a vast amount." Admission to Lambeth 
must be obtained by written request, but is by no 
means difficult, yet no important spot in London is 
so rarely visited by the general public. The enthu- 
siasm and intelligence of the resident guide, who 
has several times in the last ten years conducted 
the writer through its historic precincts, makes an 
hour at Lambeth a memorable lesson in English 
history. His huge gray cat, whose name, " Massa- 
chusetts," in other years brought a smile to the 
lips of every American who chanced to learn it, no 



2S6 flDilton's Englanfc 

longer purrs a welcome to the dim corridors and 
towers of the old palace, but has gone the way of 
all his short-lived contemporaries. Let us hope that 
his master may for many years to come live to 
tell the long, romantic tale of these old walls to all 
of England's kin beyond the sea who journey hither 
to study with reverent eyes the history of the land 
from which they came. 

Among places of minor interest in Southwark, 
which doubtless Milton well knew, was the " Tabard 
Inn," the starting-point of Chaucer's Canterbury 
Pilgrims. This stood on High Street, and was not 
demolished until 1875. In Milton's time it was 
inscribed : " This is the Inne where Sir Jeffrey 
Chaucer and the nine and twenty pilgrims lay in 
their journey to Canterbury anno 1380." It had 
then a more modern facade than Chaucer saw. The 
Globe Theatre of Shakespearian fame was then on 
the site of the present brewery of Barclay, Perkins, 
& Co. The visitor to the region just south of 
London Bridge who would see a bit of quaint 
domestic architecture that recalls the past, would 
do well to seek out, amid the noisy, hideous streets, 
a tiny green oasis, bordered by what is known as the 
Red Cross Hall and cottages. Thanks to Miss 
Octavia Hill and her friends, the little Gothic hall, 
with its frescoes of civic heroes, designed by Walter 




GOWER'S MONUMENT IN ST. SAVIOUR'S CHURCH, 
SOUTHWARK 



flMlton's England 287 

Crane, and its little row of picturesque gabled 
houses, stand here as a rest and solace to weary eyes 
and hearts that hunger amid ugliness for beauty. 
Just such houses Milton saw at every turn in the 
beautiful old London that he knew. 

No church in Southwark and only two or three 
in London are of so great interest to the antiquarian 
as St. Saviour's or St. Mary Overy's, whose curious 
name is explained in every guide-book. It has a 
record of more than a thousand years. Chaucer, 
Cruden, the author of the " Concordance," Doctor 
Samuel Johnson, Oliver Goldsmith, Baxter, and 
Bunyan were closely connected with this church and 
parish. In one of its chapels, in the generation pre- 
ceding Milton, beneath its three-light window, the 
Bishops of Winchester and London, and others act- 
ing for the see of Rome, tried and condemned to 
death by the flames seven ministers of Christ. Their 
only crime was opposition to the " usurpations of the 
Papal Schism." Among these were the rector of 
the church in which a half century later Milton was 
baptised, Bishop Hooper, who was burned at 
Gloucester, and John Rogers, the famous martyr of 
Smithfield. Another heretic, more fortunate than 
these seven, had just previously been condemned to 
the stake and pardoned for the sake of his musical 
talents. In this stately edifice, which has recently 



288 /DMlton's Bnglarrt) 

been admirably restored, lies the dust of many dear 
to lovers of poetry. Chaucer's fellow poet, friend, 
and teacher, John Gower, lies under a lofty Gothic 
canopy; his sculptured head rests on three large 
volumes, which represent his works. Milton's con- 
temporaries, Massinger and Fletcher, lie buried in 
the same grave. The latter died of the plague when 
Milton was at Cambridge. His well-known poem 
on " Melancholy," beginning : 

" Hence, all you vain delights, 
As short as are the nights 

Wherein you spend your folly ! " 

was probably familiar to the young poet at Horton, 
when he penned his " II Penseroso," although 
Fletcher's poem was not published until after that. 
Both Massinger and Fletcher are commemorated 
by modern windows. The latter's colleague, Francis 
Beaumont, whose writings are so indissolubly con- 
nected with his, is honoured with a window in which 
the friendship of the two is typified by the figures 
of David and Jonathan. 

The year before Milton's birth, the author of 
" Hamlet " and " Lear " doubtless stood within the 
choir of this church beside the grave of his young 
brother Edmond, an actor, who died at the age of 
twenty-seven, when his great elder brother's genius 



/IDllton'5 England 289 

had nearly touched its zenith of creative power. 
The parish boasts that some of the most magnifi- 
cent masterpieces of the world's literature were 
written within its borders by this, its most distin- 
guished parishioner, and England's greatest son. In 
his youth Milton may well have attended the 
funeral of the great Bishop Andrewes, whose recum- 
bent effigy is on one of the tombs that scholars will 
seek out. This man, who knew fifteen languages, 
was president of the little company of ten who gave 
the world a large part of the King James version 
of the Hebrew Scriptures, whose perfection of liter- 
ary form has never been equalled. In the Lady- 
Chapel may still be seen inscribed upon the windows 
the virulent words which would not have as greatly 
offended Milton's taste as that of the present parish- 
ioners : " Your sacrament of the Mass is no sacra- 
ment at all, neither is Christ present in it ; " " From 
the Bishop of Rome and all his detestable enormities, 
good Lord deliver us." 

The London Bridge of Milton's day was one of 
England's marvels. Standing on the site of two 
or three predecessors, it stood 60 feet above high 
water and stretched 926 feet in length. It contained 
a drawbridge, and nineteen pointed arches, with mas- 
sive piers. Much of its picturesqueness must have 
resulted from the irregularity of the breadth of its 



290 jfflMlton's Ertolarto 

arches. The skilful chaplain who built it doubtless 
planned his spans according to the varying depth 
and strength of current of the tide, and would have 
scorned the modern mechanical habit of disregarding 
conditions in order to attain exact uniformity ; thus 
his arches varied in breadth from ten to thirty-two 
feet. Over the tenth and longest was built a little 
Gothic chapel dedicated to the then new saint, 
Thomas of Canterbury. In Milton's lifetime, rows 
of houses were added to the chapel and stretched 
across toward the Southwark side. 

Between the chapel and the southern end of the 
bridge was a drawbridge, and at the north end 
of this was a remarkable edifice of wood in Milton's 
boyhood. This was called " Nonsuch House." It 
was said to have been built in Holland and brought 
over in pieces and put together by wooden pegs. It 
stretched across the bridge upon an archway, and 
was a curious, fantastic structure, carved elaborately 
on three sides. The towers on its four corners bore 
high aloft above the neighbouring buildings low 
domes and gilded vanes. It stood upon the site of 
the old tower whereon the heads of criminals had 
been exposed ; when it was taken down, the heads 
were removed to the tower over the gate upon the 
Southwark side. This had four circular turrets, and 
was a notable and imposing entrance to the bridge. 



flMlton's England 291 

At the north end of the bridge was an ingenious 
engine for raising water for the supply of the city. 
It was originally worked only by the tide flowing 
through the first arch ; but for this work several of 
the water courses were later converted into water- 
falls or rapids, and thereby greatly inconvenienced 
navigation. An extension of this simple, early 
mechanism lasted as late as 1822. 

This bridge, which was to last six hundred 
and thirty years, was as long in building as King 
Solomon's Temple, and, at the time, probably sur- 
passed in strength and size any bridge in the whole 
world. 

London Bridge is famous the world over in the 
nurseries of every English-speaking child. Milton 
himself, as the fair-haired little darling in the scriv- 
ener's house on Bread Street, probably danced and 
sang the ancient ditty, as thousands had done before 
him: 

" London bridge is broken down, 
Dance over, my Lady Lee ; 
London bridge is broken down, 
With a gay ladee. 

" How shall we build it up again ? 
Dance over, my Lady Lee ; 
How shall we build it up again ? 
With a gay ladee. 



292 /HMlton's England 

" Build it up with stone so strong, 
Dance over, my Lady Lee ; 
Huzza, 'twill last for ages long, 
With a gay ladee." 

For centuries before Milton was born, Billings- 
gate, a little to the east of London Bridge, had been 
one of the city's water-gates, and long before his 
time its neighbourhood was filled with stalls for the 
sale of fish, a far more necessary commodity in days 
when no fresh meat was to be bought in winter. 
When Stow was preparing his " Survey," Billings- 
gate was " a large water-gate, port, or harbour for 
ships and boats commonly arriving there with fish, 
both fresh and salt, shellfish, salt, oranges, onions, 
and other fruits and roots, wheat, rye, and grains 
of divers sorts." 




CHAPTER XVII. 

THE PLAGUE. — THE FIRE. — WREN. — LONDON 
REBUILT 

j[N the summer of 1665, the Great Plague 
appeared in the midst of the alarm over 
the Dutch invasion. The three earlier 
visitations of the terrible disease during Milton's 
youth were to be eclipsed in horror by this, the 
last great one that England was to know. Little 
connection between dirt and disease existed in the 
minds of even scientific men. Dirt was condemned 
as unaesthetic; but that earth floors covered with 
rushes, mixed with greasy bones and decaying cab- 
bage leaves, had any connection with the griping 
pain of the groaning child upon the cot, its father 
did not dream. Some water was brought in pipes 
from Tyburn, but much of it was taken from the 
polluted Thames near London Bridge and carried 
about the streets in water-carts. How much was 
taken for bathing purposes may be imagined. When 
a luxurious monarch like Louis XIV. found a bath 
no necessity, we need not wonder that the English 
293 



294 flDUton'3 England 

cartman, and blacksmith, and craftsman, housed in 
his narrow tenements near Smithfield or in South- 
wark, considered it a superfluity. 

The summer of 1665 was hot and oppressive. All 
through the pitiless heat the wretched inmates of the 
town, whence two hundred thousand of the fortu- 
nate ones like Milton had fled, walked around the 
gloomy and deserted streets gathering their dead. 
By September fifteen hundred were dying every day. 
The heat was aggravated b\ the bonfires which were 
kept burning in vain hope of purifying the atmos- 
phere. Physicians, ignorant, but heroic, remained at 
their posts, cupping and blistering, and uselessly 
tormenting the helpless folk who with pathetic con- 
fidence looked to them for salvation. Some men 
became insane, and some died of sheer fright. The 
suddenness of the death was one of the most 
ghastly features of the scourge. The mother who 
nursed her child at morning handed its little corpse 
at night to the man with the bell and dreadful cart, 
and knew not where its tender limbs were rudely 
thrust with the haste of a great terror which pos- 
sessed the wretched gravediggers. 

Out of a population of less than seven hundred 
thousand, probably one hundred thousand perished, 
and starvation and poverty stared many others in 
the face. 



r 



/HMlton's England 295 

Something must have been learned of the need 
of purer water, for we find London, after the fire 
next year, bestirring itself to get a general supply 
of water from a canal forty miles long, called " New 
River," which conducted a supply from Chads well 
Springs in Hertfordshire to a reservoir at Islington. 

The summer of 1666 was likewise hot and dry, 
and a furious gale blew for weeks together. Condi- 
tions were the same as in Chicago before the con- 
flagration that in November, 1871, swept over 1,687 
acres, which covered a territory four miles long 
and nearly three miles wide, and entailed a loss of 
$300,000,000, though half of the buildings were 
of wood. The moment was as propitious for the 
fire fiend as when Mother O'Leary's cow kicked over 
the lamp in the Windy City of the West. A baker's 
oven took fire in Pudding Lane, two hundred and 
two feet from the site of the present Fire Monu- 
ment, which Wren erected in memory of it that 
number of feet in height. The fire began on Sunday 
night. It was twenty-four hours before the dazed 
citizens attempted organised relief, but then it was 
too late. By Tuesday evening the flames had licked 
up everything as far west as the Temple. The 
resolute king came to the help of the inefficient 
mayor, and ordered gunpowder to be used to blow 
up buildings and thus create open spaces where the 



296 /BMlton's England 

fire would lack food. By Thursday evening the fire 
had practically ceased, and the citizens who had 
looked on at the destruction of their homes and 
churches and shops and the inestimable treasures of 
the past, sought shelter for their weary limbs. No 
telegraphic messages of sympathy, no carloads of 
provisions from neighbouring cities poured in to 
their relief, and homeless children cried for bread. 

Evelyn, in describing the conflagration, says : 
" All the skie was of a fiery aspect like that of a 
burning oven, and the light seen above forty miles 
round about for many nights. God grant mine eyes 
may never behold the sight — who now saw ten 
thousand houses all in one flame; the noise and 
crackling and thunder of the impetuous flames; the 
shrieking of women and children; the hurry of 
people, the fall of towers, houses, and churches was 
like an hideous storme and the aire all about so hot 
and inflamed that at last one was not able to ap- 
proach it. The clouds also and smoke were dismall 
and reached upon computation neere 56 miles in 
length. The poore inhabitants were dispers'd about 
St. George's Fields and Moorefields, as far as High- 
gate, and several miles in circle, some under tents, 
some under miserable hutts and hovells, many with- 
out a rag or any necessary utensils, bed or board, 
who from delicatenesse, riches, and easy accommo- 



/IMlton's Englanfc 297 

dations in stately and well-furnished houses, were 
now reduc'd to extremest misery and poverty." 

Pepys tells us that the entire lead roof of St. 
Paul's Cathedral, no less than six acres by measure, 
" fell in, the melted lead running down into the 
streets and into the crypt where books had been 
carried for safety." He notes that the fire burned 
just as many parish churches as there were hours 
from the beginning to the end of the fire. 

Dryden, in the long section of his " Annus 
Mirabilis " which describes the " Great Fire," has a 
few lines among his prosaic stanzas which bear 
quotation : 

" The ghosts of traitors from the bridge descend, 
With bold fanatic spectres to rejoice : 
About the fire into a dance they bend, 

And sing their sabbath notes with feeble voice. 



" A key of fire ran all along the shore, 

And lightened all the river with a blaze : 
The wakened tides began again to roar, 
And wondering fish in shining waters gaze. 



" The rich grow suppliant, and the poor grow proud : 
Those offer mighty gain, and these ask more : 
So void of pity is the ignoble crowd, 

When others' ruin may increase their store. 



29S flMlton's JEnQlarrt) 

" The most in fields like herded beasts lie down, 
To dews obnoxious on the grassy floor ; 
And while their babes in sleep their sorrows drown, 
Sad parents watch the remnants of their store." 

The king, who for the time being had behaved in 
manly fashion, went back to his dalliance with 
courtesans and " the burning lusts, dissolute court, 
profane and abominable lives " of which Evelyn 
writes on the day of fast and humiliation ordered for 
the occasion. 

Though there was not a particle of proof that 
the Catholics had anything whatever to do with the 
origin of the fire, the frenzy and prejudice of the 
populace attributed it to them, and an inscription 
to that effect, which later was erased, was placed 
upon the monument. 

The fire destroyed eighty-eight churches besides 
St. Paul's, together with the city gates, the Ex- 
change, the Custom House, 13,200 dwelling-houses, 
and four hundred streets. A space of 436 acres, 
two-thirds of the entire city, was consumed; and 
property then valued at £7,335,000 was destroyed. 
For six months London remained a chaos of rubbish 
heaps. Pepys writes that in March he still saw 
smoke rising from the ruins. The eight churches in 
the city proper that still remain practically as Milton 
saw them have been described in detail. They are 



flDilton's Englanfc ?99 

All Hallows Barking, St. Ethelburga's, St. An- 
drew Undershaft, of Saxon foundation ; St. Olave's, 
of Danish; and St. Helen's, of Norman foundation; 
St. Catherine Cree, Austin Friars, which was the 
Dutch church, and St. Giles's, Cripplegate, just beside 
the city wall. Of the six others that were not 
destroyed, All Hallows by the wall (Broad Street 
Ward) and St. Katherine Coleman (Aldgate) were 
rebuilt later. The four that then remained but have 
since disappeared were St. Christopher le Stocks, 
and St. Martin Outwich (Broad Street Ward), All- 
Hallows, Staining (Tower Ward), and St. Alphage, 
Aldermanbury. 

Forty churches were rebuilt after the fire, and 
these were all designed by Sir Christopher Wren, 
who when he began his gigantic task was a young 
man of thirty-five. Wren, who was a nephew of 
the Bishop of Ely, was trained under Doctor Busby 
in Westminster School, and then at Wadham Col- 
lege, Oxford, and was there noted by John Evelyn 
as a " miracle of a youth," " a prodigious young 
scholar," who showed him " a thermometer, a mon- 
strous magnet, and some dials." 

Wren was a little later one of the chief founders 
of the Royal Society, and its first meetings were 
held in his rooms. As versatile and original as 
Da Vinci, he excelled in Latin, mathematics, and 



3oo fllMlton's England 

astronomy, and was a close student of anatomy, and 
other sciences as well. Ten years before the Great 
Fire he was professor of astronomy in Gresham 
College, London, and at the age of twenty-eight, he 
was elected to the professorship of astronomy in 
Oxford. Before he was thirty and had done any 
work in architecture, Isaac Barrow declared him 
to be " something superhuman." About this time 
he invented an agricultural implement for planting, 
and a method of making fresh water at sea. A 
year before the Fire he solved a knotty problem in 
geometry which Pascal had sent to English mathe- 
maticians. Says Hooke, " I must affirm that since 
the time of Archimedes there scarce ever met in 
one man in so great a perfection such a mechanical 
hand and so philosophic a mind." Had Wren never 
designed a building he would have been famous for 
his achievements in the study of the cycloid, in 
rendering practical the use of the barometer, in 
inventing a method for the transference of one 
animal's blood to another, in methods for noting 
longitude at sea, and for other studies and inventions 
too numerous to mention. 

Wren was a self-taught architect. Before the 
Fire he erected Pembroke College Chapel at Cam- 
bridge, and the Sheldonian Theatre at Oxford. He 
then visited Paris, where he saw Bernini, and made 



/IDilton's England 301 

the most of observations of the Louvre and such 
Renaissance work as Paris then afforded. His 
bent of mind was wholly divergent from the Gothic, 
and as it proved, in the few instances in which 
he introduced its features into his Renaissance 
churches, the result was as incongruous as Chaucer's 
cap and gown upon a Roman emperor. 

London's calamity was the opportunity for this 
little man of mighty intellect. Four days after the 
fire ceased he laid before the king the sketch of his 
plan for the restoration of the city. He looked far 
into the future, and in vision saw a splendid town 
built on a well-conceived, harmonious plan. He 
proposed to have Ludgate Hill widen as it ap- 
proached St. Paul's, where it would divide into two 
broad streets around the cathedral and leave ample 
space for its huge mass to be plainly viewed. One 
of these streets should lead to the Tower and the 
other to the Royal Exchange, which was to be the 
centre of the city. Around it should be a great 
piazza, from which ten streets were to lead, and on 
the outer edge of this piazza would be situated the 
Post-Office, the Mint, and other important buildings. 
" All churchyards, gardens, and trades that use 
great fires and noisome smells " were to be rele- 
gated to the country, and the churches with their 
spires were to be placed in prominent positions on 
the main thoroughfares. 



302 /IDtlton's BnalanO 

All this meant present sacrifice for future good; 
but the short-sighted and impatient Londoners 
thought of the crying needs of the present year 
alone. The architect might implore and weep bitter 
tears, but all in vain. London must rise again on its 
old, congested plan, with its crooked alleyways and 
narrow courts. But, though the ground-plan was dis 
carded, Wren was to make the new city his monu- 
ment. Besides St. Paul's he built within and without 
the walls fifty parish churches, thirty-six of the 
companies' halls, the Custom House, and much 
besides. 

During the last eight years of Milton's life, the 
destruction of the walls of St. Paul's went on and 
the new edifice was assuming shape in the mind 
of its creator. The old walls were blown down by 
gunpowder explosions and by battering-rams. This 
took about two years, and the clearing away of rub- 
bish and building the massive foundations, longer 
still. Several schemes were considered and rejected, 
and the plan which finally took its present form was 
not begun until the funeral wreaths were withered 
upon Milton's grave. Into the history of this mighty 
structure we may not enter. In 1 710 the last stone 
of the lantern above the dome was laid by Wren's 
son in the presence of the now aged architect and of 
all London, which assembled for the proud spectacle. 



flDilton's England 3°3 

The fair walls, ungrimed by soot and smoke, rose 
fresh and perfect, a monument to one of the greatest 
geniuses of all time. 

One building erected the year after Milton's 
death is worth mentioning as an illustration of the 
consideration shown for the insane at that period. 
Bethlehem Hospital, which has been referred to, 
was in Milton's time situated on Bishopsgate Street 
Without. " This hospital stood in an obscure and 
close place near unto many common sewers ; and 
also was too little to receive and entertain the great 
number of distracted Persons both men and women," 
writes an old author. But the city with admirable 
public spirit gave ground for a better site against 
London wall near Moorfields. A handsome brick 
and stone structure 540 feet long was erected in 
1675, and large gardens were provided for the less 
insane. Over the gate were placed two figures repre- 
senting a distracted man and woman. This building 
had a cupola surmounted by a gilded ball ; tht r e 
was a clock within and " three fair dials without." 
Men occupied one end of the building, and women 
the other. Hot and cold baths were provided, and 
there was a " stove room," where in the winter the 
patients might assemble for warmth. Considering 
the ignorance of the time, astonishingly good sense 
was displayed in all the arrangements, insomuch that 
two out of every three persons were reported cured. 



3<h flDtlton's England 

As if this were not enough for one man's work, 
Wren of course was busy all these years with the 
care of all the churches. Before Milton died he 
had been knighted, and lived in a spacious mansion 
in Great Russell Square. He had by then rebuilt 
St. Dunstan's in the East in Tower Ward; St. 
Mildred's, Bread Street Ward; St. Mary's, Alder- 
manbury ; St. Edmund the King's ; St. Lawrence's, 
Jewry; St. Michael's, Cornhill, where he attempted 
Gothic work; the beautiful St. Stephen's, Wall- 
brook; St. Olave's, Jewry; St. Martin's, Ludgate; 
St. Michael's, Wood Street; St. Dionis's, Lang- 
bourne Ward ; St. George's, Botolph Lane ; and the 
Custom House. 

No interior, either of these or those that fol- 
lowed these, is so perfect as St. Stephen's, W r all- 
brook. Architecturally speaking, it has been ques- 
tioned whether St. Paul's itself shows greater 
genius. 

In most of his labours Wren was embarrassed by 
lack of adequate funds and the caprice of his 
employers. Most of his churches were ingenious 
compromises between his ideals and their necessi- 
ties or whims. His spires were in the Renaissance 
forms, but of endless variations. The most beautiful 
are so placed as rarely to be seen to advantage. 
Probably the most admired of all of them are St. 




BOW STEEPLE, CHEAPSIDE 

From a />rint published in 1798. 



flDUton's EnQlanfc 305 

Bride's and St. Mary le Bow. The former, which 
overshadows the spot where Milton conceived the 
plan of " Paradise Lost," is situated on a little 
narrow street called after St. Bride or Bridget, the 
Irish maiden, who died in 525. She had a holy well, 
which is commemorated by an iron pump within 
a niche upon its site. 

The lofty spire of the church rises to an altitude 
of 226 feet, a trifle higher than Bunker Hill Monu- 
ment, in Charlestown, Massachusetts, which is a 
measuring-rod for many Americans. 

St. Mary le Bow is on the site of a Norman church 
of the Conqueror's time, and so named because it 
was built on arches or " bows " of stone. This 
crypt still remains. The steeple of the later church, 
which rang its bells above the head of little John 
Milton on Bread Street, close by, was built a hun- 
dred and fifty years before his birth; the church 
was said to have been a rather low, poor building. 
Bow bells were nightly rung at nine o'clock, but an 
old couplet shows that they were not always 
punctual : 

" Clark of the Bow Bell, with the yellow lockes, 
For thy late ringing, thy head shall have knockes." 

To which the clerk responded : 

" Children of Cheape, hold you all still, 
For you shall have the Bow Bell rung at your will." 



306 /IDitton's England 

From the days when little Dick Whittington, 
a forlorn runaway, heard from far Bow bells sum- 
mon him back to London, the bells have played a 
notable part in the life of Londoners. A true cock- 
ney is supposed to be one born within hearing of 
these bells. Certainly the boy in Spread Eagle Court 
deserved the title. 

The spire of St. Mary le Bow rises a little higher 
than St. Bride's, and bears a golden dragon nine 
feet long. 

Upon the side of Bow Church, half hidden behind 
the tower, is an inscription which the pilgrim to 
Milton's London will step aside to read. It is 
on the tablet which was transferred from All 
Hallows Church, in which Milton was baptised, 
when it was torn down. It closes with the familiar 
lines of Dryden, the poet whom England most ad- 
mired when this new spire of Wren's was rising 
upon the ruins of the old, and close beside the birth- 
place of the greatest soul ever born to London in all 
her two millenniums of history. 

" Three poets, in three distant ages born, 
Greece, Italy, and England did adorn. 
The first in loftiness of thought surpassed, 
The next in majesty, in both the last ; 
The force of nature could no farther go, 
To make a third she joined the other two." 

THE END. 



L 



flrtoer 



Aldersgate Street, 89, 122. 

Aldgate, 155. 

All Hallows, Barking, 143. 

All Hallows Church, Bread St., 

42, 45, 306. 
All Hallows, Staining, tower of, 

155- 
Amersham, 116. 
Andrewes, Bishop, 289. 
" Arcades," 81. 
" Areopagitica," 94. 
Artillery Walk, no, 119. 
Ascham, Roger, 201. 
Askew, Anne, 191. 
Austin Friars, 24. 
Austin Friars' Church, 185-188. 

Bacon, Francis, 225. 

Bancroft, Francis, 173. 

Barbican, 95. 

Bartholomew Close, 105. 

Bartholomew Fair, 218. 

Baroni, Leonora, 87. 

Baxter, Richard, 107, 108, 197, 

276. 
Beaconsfield, 113, 115. 
Beaumont, 288. 
Bethlehem Hospital, 175, 303. 
Billingsgate, 292. 
Blake, Admiral, 257. 
" Blindness, On His," Milton's 

ode, 104. 
Blue Coat School, 195-199. 



Boleyn, Annie, 132, 283. 
Bread Street, 42-46, 120. 
Browne, Robert, 68. 
Buckingham, Duke of, 243, 

256. 
Buckinghamshire, n 2-1 19. 
Bunhill Fields, in, 120. 
Burke, Edmund, 116. 
Burleigh, 226. 

Caesar, Sir Julius, 174. 
Cambridge, 57-77 ; university 

life in Milton's time, 64. 
Camden, William, 252, 266. 
Caxton, William, 269. 
Chalfont St. Giles, in, 112. 
Charles I., 244-248, 272, 274. 
Charles II., 250, 262, 298. 
Charing Cross, 99. 
Charterhouse, 202-208. 
Cheever, Ezekiel, 198. 
Chenies, 112. 
Chequer's Court, 118. 
"Cheshire Cheese, The," 229. 
Christ's Church, 197. 
Christ's College, 59, 62. 
Christ's Hospital, 195-199. 
Civil War, 87, 92. 
Clarendon, Earl'of, 259. 
" Comus," 80, 82, 96. 
Conventual establishments, 22. 
Covent Garden, 237-239. 
Cranmer, Archbishop, 280. 



3 o8 



•ffnOei 



Cromwell, Oliver, 59, 92, 101, 
141, 180, 228, 244, 248, 249, 
256-258, 261. 

"Cromwell, Ode to," Milton's, 
104, 106. 

Cromwell, Richard, 105, ill. 

Crosby Hall, 164-170. 

Danish Remains in London, 20. 
Darwin at Christ's College, 64. 
Dickens on Old London 

Churches, 152-154. 
Diodati, Charles, 88, 91. 
Dryden, John, 122, 248, 297, 306. 
Dutch in London, 186. 

Education, Milton's Essay 

94. 
Eliot, Sir John, 134-136, 268, 

270. 
Elizabethan Age, 36. 
Elizabeth, Queen, 208, 241, 262. 
Ellwood, Thomas, 109, 

US- 
Ely Cathedral, 71. 
Ely Place, 221. 
Emmanuel College, 60, 62. 
Evelyn, 267, 296. 
Exchange, The Royal, 184, 298. 

Fire of London, The Great, 120, 

145, 189, 295-298. 
Fletcher, 288. 
Forest Hill, 93. 
Fox, George, 120. 
Fox, John, 181. 
" Fresher's Don't, The," 76. 
Frobisher, Martin, 181. 

Galileo, 86. 

Gatehouse, Westminster, 267. 
Geneva, Milton at, 87. 
Gill, Alexander, Milton's school- 
master, 53. 
Globe Theatre, 286. 
Gog and Magog, 190. 
Gothic architecture, 26-30, 34. 



Gray's Inn, 225. 

Great Hampden, 117. 

Great Kimble, 119. 

Gresham College, 184. 

Gresham, Sir Thomas, 172, 184. 

Grey, Lady Jane, 132. 

Grotius, Hugo, 85. 

Grub Street, in. 

Guild Hall, The, 189-193. 

Hakluyt, Richard, 266. 
Hampden, John, 117-119, 268. 
Hatton, Sir Christopher, 223. 
Haw, The, 51. 

Heminge and Condell, monu- 
ment to, 193. 
Henry VIII., 249. 
Heylin, Peter, 261. 
Hobson, 57. 
Holbein, 157, 241. 
Holborn, 98, 106, 225. 
Hooker, Richard, 234. 
Horton, 78-84, 92. 

" II Penseroso," 68, 82. 
Inns of Court, 225-235. 
Ireland, Horrors in, 92. 
Italy, Milton in, S6. 

James I., 262. 

Jeffreys, Judge, 196, 234. 

Jerusalem Chamber, 264. 

Jesus College, 60. 

Jewin Street, 107. 

Jones, Inigo, 238, 240, 242, 

262. 
Jonson, Ben, 180, 228, 252. 
Jordan's, 115. 
Juxon, Bishop, 246, 280. 

King's College Chapel, 67. 
King, Edward, 82. 
Knox, John, 116. 

" L'Allegro," 82. 
Lambeth Palace, 277-286. 
Lasco, John a, 1S6, 1S8. 



UnDer 



Laud, Archbishop, 144, 156, 281, 
284. 

Lawes, Henry, 81, 96, 97, 224. 

Lincoln's Inn, 227-228. 

Lincoln's Inn Fields, 98. 

Lollard's Tower, 49, 282. 

London, origin and early topog- 
raphy, 14-25. 

London life in Milton's time, 
38-40. 

London Bridge, 289-291. 

Long Acre, 237. 

Lovelace, Richard, 268. 

" Lycidas," 82, 8^. 

Manso, 87. 

Mary of Modena, 278. 

Marvell, Andrew, 104, 108, 247, 

248. 
" Massacre in Piedmont, On the 

Late," 104. 
Massinger, 288. 
Mermaid Tavern, 46. 
Milborne, Sir John, almshouses 

built by, 154. 
Mildmay, Sir Walter, 214. 
Milton, Anne, sister of the poet, 

43. 57.83' 89, 124. 
Milton, Christopher, brother of 

the poet, 43, 83, 92, 97, 124. 
Milton, Deborah, daughter of 

the poet, 102, 107, 108, 124. 
Milton, John, father of the poet, 

42, 78, 92, 94, 97. 
Milton, John, son of the poet, 

102. 
Milton, Mary, daughter of the 

poet, 98, 107, 108, no. 
Milton, Sarah, mother of the 

poet, 43, 83. 
Milton Street, in. 
Minshull, Elizabeth, Milton's 

wife, no, 123, 124. 
More, Sir Thomas, 131, 166, 241. 
Morland, Sir Samuel, 251. 
" Morning of Christ's Nativity, 

On the," 72. 



Newgate, 199. 

Newton, Isaac, 249. 

Norman remains in London, 21, 



Oxford, 62, 67, 93. 

Painted Chamber, Westminster, 
270, 272. 

Paley, William, at Christ's Col- 
lege, 63. 

Pall Mall, 100. 

" Paradise Lost," 89, 105, 107, 
in, 114, 120-122, 158. 

"Paradise Regained," 114. 

Paris, Milton in, 85, 88. 

Parr, Old, 253. 

Pembroke, Countess of, 169. 

Penn, William, 115, 145. 

Pepys, Samuel, 147-150. 

Peter the Great, 145. 

Petty France, 102. 

Philips, Edward, 89, 94. 

Philips, John, 89, 94. 

Pindar, Sir Paul, 177. 

Plague, The Great, m, 293. 

Plantagenet Period, 22, 28. 

Powell, Anne, Milton's wife's 
mother, 97. 

Powell, Mary, Milton's wife, 
93. 95- 97, 102. 

Prynne, 273. 

Puritans at Cambridge, 60. 

Pym, John, 260. 

Queen's Head Tavern, 155. 

Raleigh, Sir Walter, 133, 267, 

268. 
Ranelagh, Lady, 104. 
Raphael cartoons, 248. 
Reading, 92. 
Red Cross Hall, 286. 
Red Lion Square, 106. 
Renaissance architecture, 30-33. 
Richard II., 129. 
Richard III., 129, 165, 190. 



3 io 



fln&ex 



Rogers, John, 201, 216, 287. 
Roman remains in London, 16. 
Runnymede, 84. 

Salmasius, 102. 

St. Andrew Undershaft, church 

of, 158. 
St. Bartholomew the Great, 

church of, 24, 211-215. 
St. Bartholomew's Hospital, 215. 
St. Bride's Church, 305. 
St. Bride's Churchyard, 89. 
St. Catherine Crees Church, 156. 
St. Ethelburga's Church, 175- 

176. 
St.- Etheldreda's Church, 221- 

222. 
St. George's Chapel, Windsor, 

248. 
"Saint Ghastly Grim," 152. 
St. Giles's Church, Cripplegate, 

38,97, 107, 120, 123, 178-183. 
St. Helen's Church, Bishopsgate, 

24, I7I-I75- 
St. James's Palace, 100, 246, 248. 
St. James's Park, 99, 103. 
St. John's Gate, 209. 
St. John, Knights of, 209. 
St. Jude's Church, 156. 
St. Margaret's Church, 104, 268, 

275. 
St. Martin's Lane, 99. 
St. Martin in the Fields, 100. 
St. Mary Aldermanbury, church 

of, 104, 193. 
St. Mary Aldermary, church of, 

no. 
St. Mary le Bow, church of, 

3°5- 
St. Mary Overy's Church, 24, 

287. 
St. Olave's Church, 146. 
St. Paul's, old cathedral, 48, 121, 

297 ; new cathedral, 302. 
St. Paul's Cross, 50. 
St. Paul's School, 48, 52 ; early 

cathedral body, 23. 



St. Peter's Church, 126, 132. 

St. Saviour's, Southwark, 287. 

St. Sepulchre's Church, 199. 

St. Stephen's Chapel, 270. 

St. Stephen's, Wallbrook, 
church of, 33, 304. 

" Samson," 89. 

Sanctuary, Westminster, 269. 

Saxon names in London, 17. 

Scotland Yard, 101, 102, 240. 

Scudamore, Lord, 85, 103. 

Selden, 233. 

Shakespeare, 165, 255, 288. 

Sidney, Algernon, 107. 

Sidney Sussex College, 59, 62. 

Skinner, Cyriack, 97, 104, 108. 

Smithfield, 215-220. 

Smith, John, Captain, 200. 

Somerset House, 239, 257. 

Spencer, Sir John, 166, 174. 

Spenser, Edmund, 254. 

Sprat, Thomas, dean of West- 
minster, 258. 

Spread Eagle Court, 45. 

Spring Gardens, 99, ioi, 103. 

Staple Inn, 266. 

Star Chamber, 270, 272. 

Stow, John, 158-163. 

Strode, William, 261. 

Sutton, Thomas, 204. 

Tabard Inn, 286. 
Temple, The, 228-235. 
Temple Bar, 229. 
Temple Church, The, 229. 
Thackeray on the Charterhouse, 

206. 
Thockmorton, Sir Nicholas, 157, 

193- 

Tower Hill, 139, 144. 
Tower of London, The. 126-136. 
Toynbee Hall, 156. 
Trafalgar Square, 99, 100. 
Trinity College Library, Milton 

manuscript in, 73, 89. 
Turner, William, 150. 
Tyndale, 201. 



"lln&ei 



Usher, Archbishop, 247, 265. 

Vane, Sir Harry, 91, 99, 107, 

136-141. 
Vane, Milton's Ode to, 104. 

Waller, Edmund, 116. 
Wendover, 117. 
Westminster Abbey, 250-266. 
Westminster Assembly, 264. 
Westminster Hall, 261, 274. 
Westminster Palace, 269. 
Westminster School, 266. 
Whitechapel, 156. 



Whitehall, 99, 101, 240-250. 
Whittington's Palace, 145. 
Williams, Roger, 61, 188, 204. 
Windsor, 79, 248. 
Wolsey, Cardinal, 241. 
Woodcocke, Katharine, 104, 193, 

195, 275. 
Wotton, Sir Henry, 85, 124. 
Wren, Sir Christopher, 184, 240, 

263, 266, 299-304. 

York Street, 102. 

Young, Milton's early prsceptor, 



a 






4Hh 






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1 



